Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened To Q
by Alara Rogers
Summary: Various AU's. Most are related to TNG, so I've posted to this section, but there will be some TOS, some VOY, maybe others as well. Some AUs contain pairings with Picard, Janeway, and others, but nothing explicit.
1. One: Safe

Sometimes he watches alternate selves and their petty little obsessions with mortal, matter-based creatures. How disgusting. He can't imagine descending to that level, can't imagine actually spending _time_ with the things, wearing their forms, talking to them as if they were people. The obsession with emotional connections to a particular one specifically appalls him.

Not that he runs the risk of that problem. When he was assigned to deal with his universe's version of the creature so many of his other selves are obsessed with, he just killed the thing for defying him, and moved on.

This reassures him. If so many of his alternate selves have been so corrupted, it could have happened to him too. Now it never will.


	2. Two: Assassin

The blood of the murdered child will never wash off his hands.

Of course, this is a metaphor. He has no hands and there was no blood. A shuttlecraft accident, explosion in her impulse engine, quick and clean. He tries to tell himself it was over so fast, she couldn't even have known she was dying, but he knows better. She was a Q, albeit an unworthy one who'd rejected the Continuum and needed to die. She would have known what suddenly being cut off from the powers she'd been trying so hard not to use meant. She'd have had a nanosecond to understand her own impending death, but for a Q, a nanosecond was entirely long enough to feel terror, and regret.

Picard knows it was him. He hasn't been back there. The self-righteous posturing, the declaration of superior morality from a being with the life span and intelligence of an insect-- he just can't deal with that right now. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to see Picard's face, feel the brunt of his contempt. It was necessary but try convincing a human of that. Such soft creatures, so enamored of their own personal freedoms that they run around imposing their view of freedom on the universe.

With power comes responsibility. They took away his own powers to teach him that lesson. He wasn't happy about it, but the girl broke the law. She had to die.

He loses interest in Vash. All she ever was to him was a vicarious connection to Picard. Now Picard has been poisoned against him by his own actions, and he knows better than to think he can fix it. He dumps her on Earth, because he did promise Picard he'd make sure she wasn't hurt by being with him, and then he takes off. His obsession with humanity has curdled around him, turning bitter and poisoned for being truncated. He cannot go back and study the humans because he can't face Picard. He can't face Picard because he killed the girl. He killed the girl because he had to.

(because they'd have taken his powers if he hadn't, and he can't face that, never again)

He doesn't cross humanity's path again until some idiot accidentally releases Q from the comet they'd imprisoned him in. Q is still insisting on the right to die, and refuses to go back into protective custody. The human captain suggests she could rule on this issue, as the two Qs are evenly matched and without some arbitration they can only dance around each other, running and chasing, catching and escaping, for the rest of eternity.

He is not interested in listening to human starship captains posturing as if they have moral high ground over the Q. And after being forced to kill the girl he will not have the death of any more Q on his hands. He calls in the Continuum, and they recapture Q together and imprison him again.

The combined voices of the Continuum praise him. He's finally learned to work with the group, not against it.

He wishes the thought didn't make him so bitterly angry.

His companion calls him boring, the ultimate insult, and refuses to spend time with him anymore. His former friends say he's sold out. They're all absolutely correct. He's bored and boring, nothing in the universe engages him anymore, and he can't very well present himself as the defiant rebel angel when he's the Continuum's bully boy and assassin now. They told him his personal judgment was suspect, given his history, and let him exercise no leeway with it. They own him, but then, they always did, and he's just realizing after a billion years that fighting the truth is meaningless.

He doesn't think of the Continuum as "us" anymore. Always "them."

He stares into eternity, straitjacketed by the twin lashes of fear and boredom, and understands why Q might have wanted to kill himself. But a comet's not any better than this, and if he were going to disobey and get himself killed, he should have done it before he murdered a Q child to save his own life.

A mortal has death to look forward to, at least. Eternity sprawls out before him and he knows it will never, ever get any better than this.


	3. Three: Testing the Captain

The starship captain passed his test. He's simultaneously angry and delighted. Of course it was too easy a test, with a half-human of some psionic power there to assist the humans in the crew, but he's still thrilled that something unexpected has happened. This human, this captain, is a worthy opponent, and he aches with the desire to... do what? Set up another test, maybe. Defeat the captain, watch him crawl. Or... lose. Privately, in the places he hides from the rest of the Continuum, he admits to himself that losing turned out to be surprisingly exciting, in a universe where he almost always wins.

But it has to be a challenge. He won't give the captain a cakewalk this time. He considers offering the man access to Q powers, but a bit of research on the human's history indicates that would be far, far too easy a challenge for the captain to defeat. Bad history with a human friend who developed godlike power. This human would know better.

The human has another weakness, though, one glaring out throughout his history. How delightful. Playing the game _this_ way fills Q with a strange, thrilling sort of anticipation. In a universe of endless possibilities, anything could happen. As much as Q wants to beat the captain, see him grovel, make him admit to Q's superiority, the fact that it _might not happen that way_ makes Q feel three billion years younger, excited about a project for the first time in aeons.

It'll require a change of form, of course. Q chooses a similar form-- still tall, dark-haired, still choosing a face stronger in character than in classical aesthetic beauty-- but the opposite sex from the last form, and teleports into the captain's bedroom moments before he arrives. Yellow's not her color so she doesn't wear one of his little Starfleet's uniforms this time. The captain knows his planet's history reasonably well, so she picks late 20th century ensemble, high heels, short skirt, light makeup, and sits on his bed with one foot on the floor, one foot propped on the bed, head leaning back against the wall.

The captain steps into his quarters and stops dead, staring at her. She smirks.

"Who are you? How did you get in my quarters?"

"Hi, Jimmy," she says, grinning at him. "It's Q. Like my new look?"


	4. Four: The Louder the Screech

Q usually prefers to avoid meeting alternates of himself. It's very frustrating for an entity that prides himself on his strength of will and his ability to forge his own path to be reminded how different he could have been under other circumstances. When the nutcase from a parallel universe shows up ranting about Picard, however, and declaring that Q's own universe is obviously doomed, the mixed feelings of pity and disgust drive him to try to help.

The nutcase believes that every alternate version of Q has to be involved in a relationship with that universe's version of Picard. (Q doesn't manage to avoid making the sarcastic comment about what about universes where there _is_ no Picard. The nutcase claims there is _always_ one, although sometimes he's not bald, French, human, named Picard, or male. Q does manage to avoid asking how, then, he could possibly be defined as Picard.) He believes that if he doesn't manage to form a relationship with his version of Picard, his universe will be destroyed, and that Q's universe is obviously doomed, because Q is destined to have a romantic relationship with Picard and it will cause the timeline to be resorbed into mainline if he doesn't.

This is not the most insane thing Q has ever heard, but it's the most insane thing he's ever heard from a fellow Q, and certainly he's horrified to hear it coming from his own alternate. Quite aside from the absurdity of a romantic relationship with _Picard_, the notion that there is any such thing as destiny, that something as minor as a romantic relationship could possibly define whether or not a timeline is "real" enough to avoid resorption, or that a timeline could in fact be resorbed into mainline for being too different from other timelines, are all ideas that are simply wrong, and a Q should know better. Clearly the strain of being in love with an unworthy mortal who couldn't even be bothered to reciprocate despite the great honor of being loved by a Q had unhinged the poor entity.

So despite his natural instinct to avoid asking the Continuum's aid at all costs, Q calls them in to help him capture and rehabilitate his alternate. An insane Q really can't be allowed to roam spacetime freely. Of course, the alternate resists-- he may be insane, but he's still an alternate of Q, the most stubborn entity _in_ the Continuum, and he won't allow his perception of reality to be forcibly overwritten even if it is plainly psychotic. So they lock him up in a comet to keep him from doing any damage, and ignore his hysterical ranting about how both their universes will be destroyed.

A thousand years later Q lets his alternate out. Congenitally unable to resist saying "I told you so," he indulges himself by pointing out in excruciating detail that Picard is over nine hundred years dead and neither of their universes have been destroyed. The alternate ignores him and promptly returns to his own universe, jumping back through the intervening thousand years to intersect his home universe at the time he left it. Q sighs, realizing the nutcase _still_ believes he has to get involved with Picard to save his universe, and decides to write the whole thing off and pretend it didn't happen.

* * *

_Author's Note: Any resemblance between this AU and the plot of a well-known Picard/Q fanfic is... entirely on purpose, I assure you. I mock because I love._


	5. Five: Mermaid

Every day he walks on knives.

This is not a perfect analogy. Unlike the mermaid of the tale, he can talk to the one he loves, and he would hardly have made a sacrifice like this in the first place if there were anyone else in the picture. But he's a fish out of water, cast up onto land to gasp and eventually die, and every human activity that seemed so interesting, so different from the tedium of immortality once, has come to be excruciatingly painful.

It was the only way he could get permission to have what he wanted and the only way he could persuade Picard that he was serious about his feelings. He still thinks the man was inherently worthy of the sacrifice. When things are going well, he doesn't regret his decision. Well, mostly not. But every day the mirror shows him another gray hair, a slightly further receded hairline, another wrinkle. Every mission Picard goes on fills him with absolute terror, that this might be the one his lover won't return from. Starfleet is a dangerous business. It's not all that safe for him either, even as a civilian science advisor-- entire starships can be destroyed by enemy fire-- but at least he doesn't ever have to go on dangerous jaunts onto unknown planets or get involved with ridiculous diplomatic charades. Picard does. And someday he might not come back from one.

And that's when things are going well.

Sometimes he looks out at the stars and realizes he will never see them in their true glory again. Sometimes he tries to remember something he should be deeply familiar with, only to find the memory has disintegrated under the pressure of mortality. Sometimes he's bored, and alone, and unlike before there's nowhere he can go and nothing he can do to alleviate the boredom. He can become furiously resentful then, can take it out on Picard for driving him to this, or on anyone who happens to cross his path. Picard usually tries to avoid him when he's like this, which only makes him angrier, but he can't exactly teleport into Picard's ready room anymore. One time he hijacked the transporter to do it, but he was told that if he tried it again he really would end up in the brig, captain's domestic partner or no.

Frequently he hates Picard for driving him to this, for leading him astray so badly, for making him fall into this weak emotion and sacrifice everything for it. Rationally he knows this is unfair; Picard didn't ask for his love, didn't do anything to solicit it except be himself. When Q is upset, though, he's rarely capable of being rational about it. The mermaid was a fool, and he is a bigger fool, since he has no excuse for having decided to do something as idiotic as throw away power and immortality for love. His society didn't encourage him in it; in fact every single one of them advised him against it. It doesn't matter. He hates them too, for putting him in a position where he had to make this choice, for forcing him to decide between Picard and his powers. But most of all he hates himself.

He doesn't know how to deal with this, how to handle the twisting threads of love and hate, passion and resentment, the overwhelming need he has for Picard and his furious jealousy of the work that his lover lives for and his desperate need to pretend he's still independent, still in control of himself. Sometimes he thinks of killing himself. Sometimes he thinks of killing Picard. Effectively in his mind they're the same thing, and he won't do either one. But it hurts so very much.

Unlike the mermaid, he can talk to the one he loves. But he knows his own pain, and the way it makes him lash out, is driving away the one reason he made this sacrifice. If Picard leaves him because he's become impossible to live with, then he will have nothing to live for and no reason at all to have done this to himself. And it will happen. He sees the signs. Picard is withdrawing from him, turning on his captain faade, creating distance. Someday there will be so much distance that Q will be unable to breach it, and then his life will be over. But he doesn't know how to fix it.

Knives cut him to bloody ribbons, but they're not under his feet, they're in his heart.


	6. Six: Bad Call

_"I could have chosen to be a Markoffian sea lizard, or a Belzoidian flea. Anything I wished, as long as it was mortal." - Q, "Deja Q"_

* * *

A lizard swims uncertainly through the shallows of an ocean on Markoff Prime. There's something it's trying to remember, some sense of terrible wrongness. This is not where it was moments ago. This is not _what_ it was. It doesn't belong here.

It struggles to remember what it really is, where it really belongs. Something incomprehensible to its lizard mind lurks, buried deep in its tiny mind. Something huge, ineffable, something it simply can't focus its minimal intelligence on no matter how hard it tries.

As its quest for its memories distracts it, a bird descends to the water and snaps the lizard up with its beak. Dragged out of the water into blinding bright sunlight and harsh dry air, with the horrible cutting pain of the beak digging into its middle, the lizard has time to realize that somewhere, somehow, it has made a terrible mistake. Somewhere it made a choice, and the choice was wrong, and has led it to this.

And then the beak snaps its back in half, and it knows nothing more.


	7. Seven: Q Babysits

"How can you condemn us?" Q asks him, impassioned, demanding. "You've never even _looked_ at her. You have no idea what she is, why she's worth this to us. None of you do."

He has to admit that the passion gets to him. He can't understand why Q and Q find these mortals so fascinating as to pretend to be of them, like a Douwd or something, nor why they've taken their obsession to such ridiculous lengths. But he can't deny that they _feel_, in a way that he himself hasn't felt in... centuries? Millennia? When _was_ the last time he cared about anything the way Q and Q care about this project of theirs?

"All right," he says grudgingly. "I'll take a look. But honestly, you see one squalling infant, you've seen them all. It's just a mortal, isn't it?"

"See for yourself," the other Q says, as his companion-- and now, mate? What an absurd concept-- thrusts a bundle at him.

His first reaction-- human infant, sleeping. Oversize head, underdeveloped brain, helpless and pathetic. How any species manages to survive with such weak, dependent young, he can't imagine.

And then he sees what lies within the infant.

Shocked, he takes the infant from its mother, staring into its depths. That's _not_ a human pattern lurking in the psychespace generated by this primitive brain. The pattern responds to his instinctive probe with an eager grasp, suicidally trying to merge with him. He pushes it away, keeping it from melding into and disappearing into his far more complex pattern.

"How...?"

"You _do_ see," the female-shaped Q says, beaming at him. "You can tell what she really is."

Yes. He can see, enfolded in this tiny mortal shell, the kernel of a Q. It's something he's never seen before, never imagined seeing-- every time he's been present at the creation of one of their kind, they have come into existence almost fully formed, with nearly adult complexity. This is simple, stripped-down, primitive, and yet it's obvious what it is-- the fundamental essence of a Q, in the most basic form possible. He never even imagined something so simplistic could look like a Q... but he can't deny what this is.

Horror and revulsion-- a naked Q, a broken fragment of a Q, a thing that should not exist-- war with fascination and even protectiveness. It could _grow._ He has never seen a Q grow. This is a new thing in an existence he thought would never encounter a truly new thing again. He has to fight the instinct to devour it-- there's a reason, he suspects, why his kind don't reproduce in this lowly way, why the Q are generally created as adolescents rather than infants. It's obvious the creature couldn't survive the Continuum, not with its complete lack of defenses against being absorbed by its more powerful elders. It's also obvious that it needs to incubate within this mortal flesh; without a matter-based form anchoring it, it would probably dissipate on its own. But if it grows and develops as its mortal body does...

...In 18 years they might have a brand-new adolescent Q, _not_ created full-blown by the Continuum but allowed to evolve and grow on its own, from the template designed by these two.

What is new is too precious to him. Fascination and protectiveness win out over the revulsion at looking at an unfinished Q. "This is amazing," he says softly. "How did you _do_ it?"

"Well, we let random chance dictate the genome of the body, based on a standard human reproductive act," the male-shaped Q says. He grins. "Which, by the way, is surprisingly entertaining. You ought to try it."

Q makes a face. "Sounds grotesque, actually. I'm far more interested in how you accomplished the creation of an... infant Q." Even saying it sounds wrong. There has never been an infant Q.

"We'd be glad to show you," the female-shaped one says. "We're willing to show _all_ of you. But we can't come to the Continuum until she can handle it."

"Leave her here. Surely you can get babysitting?"

"We can't. See how she's tied to us?"

And he does see. The child's creation is an ongoing collaborative effort. Her Q nature is still too simple to survive on its own; she needs a feed of processed energy, as Q in the Continuum do, but she can't take it in the form it comes from in the Continuum. If her parents were to enter the Continuum the child would be overloaded, and her Q-self would disintegrate under the strain. The mortal body might live, but what animates it and makes it more than human would be gone.

Q shakes his head. "If you don't go home and explain yourself, they're going to charge you with causing a discontinuity. They'll exile you or something. And they'll forbid you to draw on the Continuum at all."

He can sense the shock the other two feel even before he sees it reflected in their mortal forms. "We haven't caused a discontinuity! We're on the verge of the greatest discovery the Continuum has experienced in a few million years, and they can't wait a mere handful of years until our daughter is ready?" the female-shaped Q explodes.

He shrugs. "I didn't make the decision."

"But can't you tell them--"

"Tell them what? Have they _ever_ listened to me? If I take up championing your cause I might well doom it."

"But there is something you can do," his friend in the male form says.

"What-- no. Oh, no. I'm not getting involved."

"It would be the perfect solution. We can go home and argue our case, and show them what we're trying to do here, and why she's so important. You can stay here--"

"And feed your kid? Do I look like a babysitter?"

"But you could do it. They aren't accusing _you_ of anything. And if you _would_ do it it helps to argue our case, that if a Q who previously thought we were being complete idiots has agreed to help us it must mean there's something worthwhile here."

"Please," his female-formed friend says. "We can't cut our connection to her unless she's got a link to another Q, and we can't go into the Continuum without cutting that connection first. It doesn't have to be very long; just long enough for us to argue our case and get them to give us more time."

"Oh, that could take _centuries._"

"No, it can't. Because she'll be ready in two decades or less, no matter what, so if it takes that long the point would be moot."

"I hope you don't expect me to _raise_ her."

"No, of course not. That's our job."

The other one says, "All we're asking is for you to stay outside the Continuum while we're in it, and vice versa, until she's old enough that she either doesn't need the energy feed, or she can survive the Continuum."

He looks again at the child, at the nascent Q she is. Now that he's no longer seeing her as an unfinished project, he perceives her as having a weird beauty, a purity in her simplicity. It hits him then that his friends have found a way to create something truly worthy of a Q's creative talents, something that will last as long as they will... so long as the Continuum doesn't cut them off prematurely. He's been so frustrated by the fact that nothing he does seems to have any long-term impact, nothing he creates can last as long as he can, and he knows many Q feel the same way. In a way he actually envies them.

And as bizarre as the notion of him protecting and sheltering a child, of all things, is... he _wants_ to be part of this creation. He wants to participate in what they're doing. The Continuum might be changed permanently by this project, and change is what he lives for.

"Oh, all right," he sighs with mock petulance. "Show me what to do."

In a moment, the two have shown him exactly how they created her, and how they are linked to her, and helped him form a link of his own. He can feel the child's mind, such as it is-- a primitive soup of emotion, no higher mentation at all, and yet there's something curiously satisfying about the way her raw emotions turn to embracing him as he forms the link. She _trusts_ him. Mortals don't trust him, and certainly his fellow Q don't. She's too stupid to know any better, and yet, it feels pleasant nonetheless.

The Q in female form bends over and kisses the baby. "We'll be back soon, sweetheart. You be good for your Uncle Q, okay?"

"Uncle." Q shudders. "Please don't use that term in my hearing ever again."

The male-shaped Q smirks. "Would you rather be her godfather?"

There's something awfully silly about naming a god as a godfather to the child of two gods. "Just go," he says. "Leave me to my fate."

The other smiles. "She's really not that bad."

The two of them flash out, disappearing back to the Continuum. Q looks down at the baby, who has woken up and is attempting to grab his nose. "Well. I seem to be stuck with you for the moment."

He doesn't understand why he feels what he feels. He doesn't understand why he suddenly believes he would defy the entire Continuum to protect this helpless creature. He's a Q. They're not known for protecting the weak. And yet.

Q holds the first child of his species in his arms, bemusedly. Without quite noticing what he's doing, he begins to rock her back and forth.


	8. Eight: Prisoner of Love

For two hundred years he has been imprisoned within a comet, brooding. For two hundred years he has had nothing to do but think about the unfairness of it all, and to hate the Continuum for putting him here, and to hate _her_ for driving him to it.

When he made the decision to save his mortal lover's people from the Borg, he didn't think there would be any serious consequences. Technically, it's forbidden to intercede at that level, particularly against the Borg, but other Q break that rule all the time and nothing really bad ever happens to them. And her people are prized by many in the Continuum as confidants, listening boards. It is impossible to safely expose one's true emotions to other Q, and particularly impossible to ask for emotional advice without risking being mocked for the next ten thousand years over it. He isn't the only Q to find value in talking to an El-Aurian Listener, and not the first one to enter an emotional relationship with one.

So when he saw the Borg on their way, he came up with what he'd thought was a particularly clever plan. He put a forcefield around the El-Aurians' solar system that would block out all subspace communication, thus instantly breaking the connection Borg had with one another. It meant that the El-Aurians needed to use regular lightspeed radio to communicate within their own solar system and relay stations at the edges to convert between subspace and lightspeed radio, but that was a small price to pay for salvation from genocide, he thought. As soon as a Borg cube crossed the forcefield, all the Borg within would lose their connection, not only to the Collective, but to each other. Then the confused, partially amnesiac, lonely creatures would be vulnerable to El-Aurian emotional manipulation, promising them friendship, connection and understanding to replace the Collective togetherness they had lost. By the time the Borg adapted to the forcefield, the El-Aurians would have taken in a few thousand former Borg, who would bring with them Borg technologies. El-Aurians were a peaceful people, never having needed more than their skills at managing other sentient beings to avoid conflict. That technique wouldn't work on the Collective, but the technologies brought by former Borg _would._ It was elegant and it would hoist the Collective on its own petard. He's still proud of it, even after what it's brought him.

He didn't stop to think about why none of the other Q who had El-Aurian friends or lovers had bothered to come up with a solution. He was egotistical enough to assume it was just because they weren't as smart as he was, or didn't care as much as he did. It never occurred to him that his difficulty with politics back home, and his lack of desire to follow it, could hurt him.

Because what he didn't know was that some high up in the Continuum fear the El-Aurians, precisely because of the emotional hold they have on many Q. The Continuum only works as a unity because its members need to turn to one another for emotional connection, and if the Continuum stops working, none of them will be able to channel their powers. The destruction of the El-Aurians wasn't planned by the Q Continuum, but in the eyes of some of their most influential Q it _was_ greatly to be desired. And the method of his interference put together beings who presented a psychological danger to the Continuum's existence with beings whose drive toward perfection and adaptability made them a future potential physical threat. The Continuum was not amused.

So they threw the book at him. He was shocked, totally uncomprehending, when they sentenced him to ten thousand years imprisoned in an asteroid. Although the Q can move through time, the way such an imprisonment works will prevent him from later returning and moving freely through the universe during any time that he has been in his prison. El-Aurians are long-lived by mortal standards, but in ten thousand years his lover, and her children, and her children's children, will all have long ago become dust. And he raged, and protested the unfairness, but none of it mattered. He saved a species the Continuum wanted dead, and created an alliance between two peoples the Continuum greatly feared an alliance between. He placed his mortal lover above the needs of his own kind. They called him a traitor and they locked him away.

And so he who cannot bear any length of boredom has been doomed to near-sensory deprivation for two hundred years, nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to do but brood on the unfairness of his sentence. He hates the Continuum for doing this to him, and he hates his mortal lover for being his weakness, for luring him into disobeying the Continuum for her sake. The joy she once gave him curdles with rage, and he begins plotting revenge against her. Not that he'll actually be able to do anything to her directly, because she'll be long, long dead once he is released. But he'll find a way. He'll torment her great-great grandchildren, or he'll revoke the protection he once gave her people from the Borg, or he'll destroy them himself.

The time drags on with no marker and no respite, and subjectively seems eternities longer than it actually is, but his objective, Q sense of time needs no markers. He knows he's only two hundred years into what was supposed to be a ten-thousand year sentence when the asteroid shifts around him and the force field that binds him here weakens, energy from the outside intruding through it. In a moment he sees the chance for freedom, and takes it, following the energy path to its source.

And _she_ is there.

Astonished, he materializes, finding himself aboard a spacegoing vessel. There are several El-Aurians manning various consoles, and his lover in the middle of the room, already running toward him. "Oh, thank the holy! It worked!" She throws her arms around him. "I'm so sorry it took me this long to find you. I've been searching ever since I found out what they did to you."

It has never, ever occurred to him that a mortal, any mortal, even the one he sacrificed his freedom to save, would search for him or seek to free him. Honestly, he wouldn't have thought a mortal capable of freeing him, but even besides that, it never occurred to him that she would try. All the resentment and rage he built up toward her in his captivity melts away in a moment. "How... did you find out?"

"I have my ways," she says, smiling. "Some of your kind are almost respectable, you know. Not everyone agreed with what your Continuum did to you, or why."

"And they told you where I was?"

"'Where' in a relative sense, yes. I've been searching for you for almost two centuries." She shakes her head. "I can't believe they did this to you for saving us."

"I can't believe you went looking for me."

She smiles brilliantly at him. "Did you doubt it? You saved my people. And even if that hadn't happened, I told you. I love you. I would never abandon you."

There will be consequences, he knows. The Continuum will come and try to take him back. He may have to literally fight for his freedom. He may have to go into hiding, or find as many friends and supporters as he can to back him in an appeal. But for now it doesn't matter. He holds her tightly against him, marveling at the sheer simple joy of being material, of being able to _feel_. For now, he is free.


	9. Nine: The Cold Equations

_Author's Note: This section was inspired by a discussion with Heylir, who's writing a Russian Deja Q spinoff, "To Be Human". However as usual all ideas and execution are mine. _

* * *

When the door to his temporary quarters opens, and Picard enters with two armed security guards, Q knows. It isn't the presence of the guards that tips him off, though that's confirmation. It's the wintry expression on Picard's face, the arctic cold mask that cannot hide the ashen color of his skin or the bleakness in his eyes.

But Q is not going to make matters easy for Picard. "Jean-Luc," he says, making his voice sound cheerful, though with an edge of tension he cannot quite hide. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"

Picard breathes deeply. "Q, I regret to tell you... I have made a decision. The _Enterprise_ has taken considerable damage in protecting you, and the Bre'el IV moon is tearing the planet apart with tidal forces. If we cannot return the moon to its orbit within the next few hours, the loss of life will be incalculable. We... cannot continue to protect you from the Calamarain."

He suspected it the moment Picard arrived, but it hits him like a body blow nonetheless. He had believed the human's rhetoric about compassion and mercy. He had thought he could find sanctuary here, maybe even a place to belong. "So... what does that mean? Are you going to send me to the planet? Ship me off to a starbase? What?"

Picard shakes his head, very slowly. "We don't have the time or resources to send you to a starbase. And if I send you to the planet, and the Calamarain follow you, they can make a disastrous situation far worse. The planet has no shielding at all and all of its disaster control resources are occupied trying to save people from the effects of the moon's fall." For a moment, his eyes flicker away from Q's, but they return, as if by an incredible effort of will. "I can give you a shuttlecraft and allow you to make your own way. That is the best I can do for you."

Q blinks, uncomprehending at first. A shuttlecraft? What good would that do him? The Calamarain can travel at high warp. Does Picard seriously think Q can outrun them in a shuttle?

And then he realizes, and it is cold fire washing over him, as if the winter in Picard's face has become a storm lashing against him. Picard knows perfectly well that Q won't be able to get away. That's why he looks so frozen, steeling himself to do something that horrifies him. He is going to sacrifice Q to his death in order to save Bre'el IV and the ship.

For a moment Q feels lightheaded, the room spinning. He thought Picard was abandoning him when Picard arrived, but it's worse than that. Picard is going to kill him. Or give him up to be killed, but from Q's perspective it's the same thing. He would never have imagined this -- he thought he knew humans, thought he knew Picard in particular. But then, he hadn't thought of what would happen if the _Enterprise_ could not, in fact, protect him from his enemies, or what would happen if he arrived in the middle of a crisis and it was his life or a few million random mortals.

Q laughs, because if he doesn't he might burst into tears, or scream and run away, and neither strike him as appropriately dignified under the circumstances. "You always manage to surprise me, Jean-Luc. You know that? Just when I think I know what you're going to do. That's what I always liked about you, when I had my powers. You were unpredictable."

"I'm sorry," Picard says.

"But it doesn't matter, does it? Because however noble and ethical the great Jean-Luc Picard may be, the fact remains that you are ruled by the same equations that rule all mortals. And if one person has to die so that millions will live, well, so be it. Right?"

"I... We cannot be certain the Calamarain will kill you. You might manage to escape..."

"Oh, no. Don't lie to me, Picard, and don't lie to yourself if that's what you're doing. If I leave this ship and its shielding, the Calamarain _will_ kill me. There's no ambiguity about it." He hears his own voice, louder and faster than usual, slightly higher pitched. "In fact let me resolve any wishful thinking you might have in that regard. I won't take a shuttlecraft. You can throw me out the airlock directly, because I'd rather die of asphyxiation in vacuum than let the Calamarain take as much time with killing me as they'd like."

Picard takes another deep breath. "Q, I am sorry I must do this. If there were another way I would take it, but there's no time. If there is any way to give you a fighting chance..."

"There isn't." Q stares hard at Picard. "Don't fool yourself, Picard. This is murder."

Picard bows his head, closing his eyes. "Yes. I'm sorry. I cannot let an entire planet be destroyed to save you."

Q smiles with false brightness. "Well, then you learned your lessons well, Picard. You _can_ do something that's necessary, even if it goes against every ethical belief you have. I'm proud of you." In a twisted way, he is. He wanted to show them the Borg, last time, because he feared that the weakness of their compassion and peacefulness would end up destroying them. Nice to see that Picard took the lesson to heart, though he might have hoped for better circumstances to see that in. He walks forward. "So where's your airlock? I thought you said time was of the essence, here."

"You should take a shuttlecraft."

"Going to stun me and throw me in one? If I'm going to die anyway, I see no reason to drag it out. In fact I don't suppose you'd consider just shooting me first?"

"No."

"You should think about it. That would really be the merciful thing to do, you know."

"Q, we are not murderers!"

"Funny, you must know a different definition of that word than I heard. Because from what I hear, if you kill someone that makes you a murderer, and throwing me to the Calamarain, with or without a shuttlecraft, will kill me."

"I have no choice," Picard says in almost a whisper.

"No, I don't suppose you do." He marches forward. "Lead the way."

He's terrified, of course, and shocked, and horrified. He doesn't want to die -- miserable as this mortal existence has been so far, he still prefers it to non-existence. And the fact that the beings he genuinely had come to believe really were gentler and kinder and more merciful than their closest evolutionary neighbors will be the ones to send him to his death both stuns him and utterly humiliates him, because of course he should have known better. The Universe kills that which is gentle and compassionate. The humans wouldn't be alive today if they weren't just like all the others at their stage of being. The fact that he seriously thought otherwise, and is now proven wrong, is so embarrassing it almost makes the notion of dying seem pleasant. Almost.

But he's not going to show any of that. He's not going to weep, even though his chest feels tight and he thinks maybe he wants to. He's not going to beg for his life. He walks in front of the two guards, head held high, studying the way Picard moves as he walks in front of Q. Stiff, rigid, almost jerky. Extremely reluctant. He doesn't want to do this any more than Q wants him to, but he feels he has no choice. And realistically, maybe he doesn't. Q can do the math. He knows he's not worth a few million mortals, not in this reduced state. In a strange way, Q begins to feel sorry for Picard. Killing Q was the obvious solution to the problem from the beginning, and the fact that it's taken so long that the planet has started to tear apart from tidal stresses means that either Picard is an idiot or Picard waited until the absolute last second before making this decision, and Q doesn't really think Picard is an idiot.

In a few minutes Q will be free of all this, beyond fear and humiliation and pain. But Picard will have to live with himself for the rest of his mortal existence. Q has very, very rarely experienced guilt in his lengthy existence, but he remembers what it feels like. Quite possibly, death is preferable.

They reach the shuttle bay, where there are also space suits and airlocks. Picard continues on toward the shuttles, but Q stops when they reach the airlock.

"I'm serious, Picard. I'm not going to take your idiotic shuttlecraft. There's no point."

Picard turns around. "Do you expect me to throw you out into space with nothing but a space suit?"

"No, I expect you to throw me out into space with nothing but my clothes. That way, I'll be dead by the time the Calamarain reach me."

"Q, you don't even know for certain that they are trying to kill you! Some cultures, some species, practice corporal punishment rather than capital. What if the objective is simply to deliver some sort of finite punishment and move on? I realize that pain must be a new experience for you, but death is final. If there's any chance--"

"I told you. There is none. I know the Calamarain. They don't go in for public floggings, Picard, they want me dead. Painfully. If I must die, I don't want to be tortured first." He swallows. "Please. I know you have to give me to them. But let it be on the terms I choose, not at their hands."

Picard sags slightly. "At least you must wear a space suit," he says in that harsh almost-whisper again. "I cannot just _space_ you. I need to know you have some chance, even the smallest, most impossible chance, of survival. If the Calamarain leave you be for some reason, we can pick you up again, but not if you have no suit."

The Calamarain won't leave him be, of course, but he doesn't want to spend his final minutes arguing the point with Picard. "All right. I'll take the space suit, if you insist, although of course you realize all this is just to salve your conscience and in fact I don't have the tiniest chance of survival and you're kidding yourself."

"Q..."

"Give me a suit."

The suit is difficult and bulky, rather obnoxious to put on, and the pointlessness of it all irritates him, but he humors Picard because if Picard spends all his time arguing with Q about exactly how Q will die then he's not going to be able to save that planet he's killing Q for, and that would be truly pointless. When he's done putting it on, he steps into the airlock and waits, facing Picard and not the exterior door, as the inner door shuts.

"I want you to know," Picard says, and there's a crack in his voice. "I did not choose this lightly. If there were not millions of lives at stake -- if there was any other way--"

Q smiles sadly. Picard doesn't even like him. The Continuum showed very little sign of concern or regret for the decision they claimed he drove them to, and they were supposed to have been his family, his home. The grief this small mortal feels at killing him is more than he got from those who supposedly loved him. There's a lump in his throat.

"It's all right, Jean-Luc. I forgive you."

He watches that sink in, watches the pain Picard has been trying uselessly to mask suddenly blossom in his face, and feels a sense of Pyrrhic triumph. At least the person who kills him will hurt for having done it for the rest of his life. He does, in fact, forgive Picard, but he also wants to see that pain. He wants to know he matters, that at the end of his existence someone will mourn him, even if the only reason is the man's horror at having to kill someone who came to him for help. And by telling Picard he forgives him, he's twisting the knife.

"I... if you need a moment, I will wait until you're ready."

He's not ready. He'll never be ready. He was an immortal; he was never supposed to die. "Go ahead," he says.

And as he sees Picard's hand reach for the airlock release, he unsnaps the catch on his own helmet, yanking it off just as the door opens and pulls his breath away, and then him. The last thing he sees before he falls into the blackness of space is Picard's face, white with horror. That, and cheating the Calamarain by choosing his own death, are the two things he clings to for comfort as vacuum blinds him and cold burns him and finally the lack of air makes everything go dark.


	10. Ten: Daddy's Little Girl

_Author's Note: This AU is based on the Voyager episodes "The Q and the Grey" and "Counterpoint". I am not responsible for the similarity of the villain's name to the Wookkie homeworld from __Star Wars__ -- it's canon, sue Paramount if you don't like it._

* * *

There is much to do after the end of the war – alliances to be forged, laws to be made or repealed, broken parts of what was once a continuous whole to be knitted back together, and he is needed constantly. As the ideological leader of the side for Change, he's been catapulted from the somewhat despised rebel outcast to one of the leaders of the Continuum. Really, it's a kind of grim joke. He always thought meetings of the Continuum were tedious, and now he has no choice but to sit through them, because it's his ideas that are reshaping the Continuum.

A trip to the mortals' universe would be a break in the tedium, but he can't afford to take the time. Still, he keeps a tiny part of his attention on Pandora, watching her grow. She doesn't do much; by human standards she might be something of a prodigy, but by Q standards she's quite useless, spending most of her time eating and sleeping and doing other, far more grotesque mortal things, and it's just as well that he never has time to visit because he really doesn't want to deal with that aspect of her. Let her mortal mother tend her mortal body. He's waiting for the Q parts of her to come to life.

And then one day he hears her call for help.

It isn't a word. It's a thought form, the way the Q communicate directly with one another, the transmission of an idea without speech to constrain it. But if it had been a word, the word would have been "Daddy!"

He doesn't even bother to excuse himself from the latest meeting, just flashes out.

Before he materializes on Voyager, he assesses the situation. Janeway is distressed, angry, fearful. An alien – a member of the Devore species, dressed in the uniform of an inspector – is holding Pandora. Q reviews the history, checking up on what's already happened before his arrival. This is the third time _Voyager_ has been inspected by Devore warships for contraband telepaths. Janeway actually _is_ smuggling telepaths to safety – the Devore send telepaths to concentration camps, a crime against evolution in Q's opinion, and he'd think highly of Janeway and her noble decision to rescue these people if it hadn't put his daughter in jeopardy. Since the inspector, Kashyk, can't find any telepaths, due to Janeway's clever trick of keeping them suspended in the transporter buffer in an immaterial state, he's made a closer inspection of Janeway's crew.

Q watches the Continuum's record of events, plucking Janeway's and Kashyk's memories of what occurred out of their minds and adding them to the record, as his rage builds. When the Devore inspection team scanned Pandora, they found evidence of an active psionic center in her brain – not active telepathy, but in their experience, only telepaths would have active psi. They demanded that Janeway give up her daughter for further study. Janeway has stalled, argued, pleaded, and all but done backflips to persuade Kashyk not to take the baby, all in vain. Facing the possible destruction of her ship, or the capture and relocation of all of her crew to concentration camps, if she doesn't comply, Janeway has allowed herself to believe Kashyk's lying reassurances that the tests will be non-invasive. She's already coming up with a plan to give the baby up to stall for time, and then put together a rescue squad, beam over, grab Pandora back and use Seven of Nine's knowledge of Borg transwarp corridors to make a quick getaway, figuring that the Borg are at the moment less of a threat than the Devore. And it would be a beautiful plan except that Q can read Inspector Kashyk's mind, and he knows that by the time Janeway launches her rescue operation it will already be too late.

Pandora is crying in the Devore's arms, wailing in her voice for her mother and in her mind for her father. Q materializes behind the inspector.

"Thank you, I'll take her now," he growls, using telekinesis to yank Pandora out of the Devore's hands. He could have used teleportation, but species with transporters have a framework to understand teleportation; telekinesis will terrify the Devore more. The man spins around, and his minions point their guns at Q. Q vanishes and rematerializes, baby in arms, next to Janeway.

He does his best to quiet his Q-speech down to a volume that won't deafen the tiny human brain, sending "shh, daddy's here" in as soothing a mindvoice as he can manage. It seems to work. The little creature shudders in his arms and clings harder, but her sobbing stops.

"What in the name of—" the inspector starts. At the same time, Janeway says, "Q!"

He grins at her. "Miss me, Kathy?"

She has, actually. The sense of relief he can feel coming from her is almost material; he's surprised she doesn't buckle to her knees from the intensity of it. But she doesn't show it on her face. "I had this situation under control," she says. "You didn't need to get involved."

"Oh, if only that were true."

"Sir, he reads off the scale," one of the inspector's goons said.

"All right. You, whoever you are. Surrender yourself and the child immediately, or we will shoot to kill."

"That sounds like fun," Q says to the Devore. "Why don't you try that?"

"Inspector, I wouldn't provoke him if I were you," Janeway said. "He's not a telepath."

"Our readings say he is."

"Your readings have no idea what he is. He's much more powerful than you realize. I think your best course of action is probably to apologize and get the hell off my ship."

"No, no, Kathy, I'm afraid it's far too late for that," Q says. "You have no idea what they were planning to do to Pandora, do you?"

"Fire," the inspector says, as if he thinks Q's distraction in talking to Janeway is going to give him a great opportunity. Q bends the phaser fire into a spiral until it manages to hit itself and explode in mid-air. Then he melts the guns. The Devore men scream as molten metal pours out of their gloved hands.

"Q, don't," Janeway says. "Let them go."

"Pandora doesn't want me to let them go. She wants to see the bad men who scared her get a time-out, Mommy."

"She wants no such thing. _You_ want revenge. But you can be bigger than that, Q. You're a god. They're only mortals. You don't have to hurt them to prove you're stronger than they are." She reaches out to him. "Please give her to me."

"No. She wants her daddy right now. Mommy was going to let her get vivisected. I think it's going to take a lot of cookies to get you back in her good graces, Kath. And maybe a new teething rattle."

"Captain Janeway," the Devore inspector snarls. "You _mated_ with _that?_"

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes, Q is the father of my child," Janeway says.

"Poor, poor pity party for Kashyk. He thought he was going to get some starship captain tail," Q says in a singsong voice. "But she wasn't putting out, so he thought he'd up the ante by taking her baby. Teach _her_ not to sex up Devore inspectors for favors. Too bad the baby daddy was out of his league. In more ways than one."

Kashyk attempts to contact his ship. "Fire on Voyager," he gasps, still in pain from the melted gun.

"Kathy? Can you put his warships on your screen there? I want him to see this."

"Q, just let them go! You've beaten them; I think they can all acknowledge that. Inspector Kashyk, you _can't beat Q in a fight._ His species are virtually omnipotent. If you want to survive, you _have_ to back down!"

"Were you not listening to me?" Q demands. He grabs Janeway's shoulder with his free hand, facing her. "_They would have dissected her_. It's too late for you to persuade me to spare them. Far, far too late."

"Dissected…" She turns pale. "Kashyk. Is this true?"

"Why don't you ask your telepathic lover?" Kashyk says, still snarling. "If he can _read minds_, he must know _everything!_"

"I do know everything, so your sarcasm is falling a little flat. Since Kathy hasn't really got a screen large enough in this ready room, how about I make one for us?" He snaps his fingers and manufactures a viewscreen, hooked into the same cameras that the main screen on the bridge uses. "Are you watching carefully, Inspector?"

Then he snaps his fingers and the Devore warships explode. One of the Devore, not Kashyk, howls and throws himself at Q. Q disintegrates him with a look.

Janeway shakes her head. "Give me the baby, Q," she says softly.

"Gladly." He hands Pandora to Janeway, by hand because the little girl is already shaken and a teleport or a telekinetic carry won't help. A primitive reflex of her human brain she'll have to get over, of course, but she's less than two years old. He'll let the human brain finish developing before he starts challenging it to become a Q.

"Well, Captain Janeway was right, it seems," Kashyk says hoarsely. "I can't stand up to you. But then, that only proves the rightness of our cause. Eventually, telepaths take over their own species, and then they dominate other species, with no more respect for sentient life than we'd grant insects. You can kill me, but it'll only prove I was right to fight the battle I've fought my whole life."

"I could kill you," Q agrees. "Too bad for you, I'm not going to."

"Q…" Janeway says warningly.

"What? _What?_ Kathy, I like you and all, but do you seriously think that just because you bore me a child, you have the right to tell me how to do my job?"

"You're not doing your job. You're indulging in torture and petty revenge. I understand it, Q. If they wanted to vivisect our baby… I understand _exactly_ how you feel. But it's still wrong."

"That's where you're wrong, Kathryn," he says softly. "I am, in fact, doing my job." He turns toward the Devore inspector, who is at least trying to face him bravely, though the pain in the man's hand from the burns left by the molten phaser makes it difficult. "You see, I sat in judgement on _your_ species, and you passed," he says, still talking to Janeway. "That was my job. And it is still." He smiles at the Devore. It is not a nice smile. "I am vested by the Q Continuum with the authority to pass judgement on mortal species. And I hereby declare yours to be grievously savage, and a dire threat to the evolution of the sentients and pre-sentients of the Delta Quadrant. Forgive me for failing to notice your rapacious behavior before, but the Continuum's been a little distracted lately. Now, however, you have our _complete_ attention."

"What…" Kashyk can barely get the words out. He turns toward Janeway. "What is he talking about? Judgement on my _species_?"

"It's what he does," Janeway says, holding Pandora close and rocking her. "I'm sorry. I've done my best to talk him out of it."

"You – you _can't!_ Please, my people have nothing to do with this! Do what you want to me, but leave the Devore out of this!"

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Kash," Q says in his best imitation of the computer from the Terran entertainment film _2001_, although Janeway probably won't get the joke and Kashyk certainly won't. He leans down into the man's face. "Your people have been standing in the way of evolution – not only of your own species, which is crime enough itself, but you block the evolution of other species as well. This cannot be permitted."

"Captain. Do something," Kashyk pleaded. "There are three trillion Devore in the galaxy!"

"Yes, there are," Q says. "But I'm betting that number's going to drop _real_ fast." He stands up, drawing himself to his full height. "For your crimes against other species, I sentence the Devore to be confined to your original homeworld, indefinitely."

"Wait. How can you… three trillion people can't all fit on our original homeworld. We have colonies, bases, space stations and starship cities. We can't possibly all go back."

"Well, if it were up to you, I suppose you wouldn't." Q snaps his fingers. The Devore in the room, all except for Kashyk, vanish. He'd send Kashyk home as well, but he's not done twisting the knife. "But _now_ you're all there. All except for you, and you'll be joining them shortly." He smiles coldly, sardonically. "Whoops, looks like three trillion _can't_ all fit. I'm predicting mass murder to break out in a day or two, famines in a week, plague in a month. Don't worry, after a couple of years of massive die-offs I'm sure you'll reach equilibrium with your planet again." He leans forward again. "There is now a force field barrier around your homeworld. No energy will enter except for the light from your sun, and none will leave but the heat and light from your planet. No matter can enter or leave unless a Q sends it there. You are _confined_ to your homeworld, all of you, until you learn to stop killing your telepaths. When the population of the Devore species is majority telepathic, you will be permitted the stars again."

"No," Kashyk whispers. "No. You can't _do_ this."

"I just did."

"Q, please," Janeway says. "Not three trillion on a single planet. Look, Pandora's safe. They didn't kill her, they didn't hurt her. You can afford to show them some mercy. Let them have some of their colony worlds, _something_ to ease the population pressure. Give them the breathing space to reduce their numbers naturally, through population control, not through famines and plagues."

"Oh, you think famines and plagues are unnatural?"

She sighs. "You know what I mean, Q. You're just being vicious. I do understand how you feel, but there are probably billions of innocent children, no more complicit in the Devore's crimes than Pandora is in anything you or I have ever done, on that planet. For _their_ sake, show some mercy. Please."

He wants to be a god of wrath. He wants it so badly it's all he can do to control the urge to kill the bastard who touched his daughter, horribly, and then resurrect him so he can kill him again. But Janeway manages to make him feel small and petty, somehow. "Oh, all right," he says irritably. "I'll let them have the entire solar system, and I'll move all their existing space stations and starships back into the system. They can have whatever they can terraform in their own star system."

"There's only one planet besides our homeworld that _can_ be terraformed in our home system," Kashyk says.

"Well, I guess you're going to be moving a lot of people there, then."

"What about the Devore telepaths?" Janeway says. "If you lock them up with the rest of the Devore, isn't that punishing them for being the victims?"

"You're pushing me, Kathy," Q says warningly. He sighs. "Fine. The Devore telepaths have all been sent to that sanctuary world you were trying to get to. _But_, the genetic potential is still there in your species, _Inspector._ Telepaths will be born. How you treat them is going to have a lot to do with how quickly you get back out into space."

"Why?" Kashyk asks. "I understand, we threatened your daughter and you want revenge. But why do you care so much what we do with telepaths? Are you afraid that in our research into defeating the scourge of mind-reading, we'd have found a way to defeat you and your kind someday?"

Q opens his eyes wide, making an exaggerated expression of disbelief, for several beats before letting his face go hard again. "In a word? No," he says, imbuing the sentence with disgust and dismissal. "You would never have been a threat to us. But it is the destiny of any sentient species which survives the first stage of its sentience to eventually cast off its material form and become pure energy, and the first step of that process is usually telepathy. You are destroying the other species in this part of the galaxy by purging them of the genetic potential to evolve into something that can transcend matter. And let me say that after what I've been through recently, the concept of killing people to preserve a status quo that avoids your personal fears and prevents evolution and growth is even more horrific and disgusting than I used to find it, and it's not a concept I was _ever_ a fan of. If you were pruning only your own species, the Continuum would find it reprehensible but not criminal. But you are a danger to others, and so we take action, and pass judgement."

He teleports suddenly to directly behind the man, and whispers in his ear. "I'm sending you home, Inspector. And my advice? Don't have children. Your world will be a hellhole for the next several generations… and besides, _I_ might come looking for a little personal payback."

And then he sends Kashyk to the Devore homeworld.

Janeway is clutching Pandora tightly. Her eyes are very, very hard as they look at him. "So. The Continuum intervene when a species is destroying other species? News to me. What have you done about the Borg lately?"

"Don't even start, Janeway. My patience is very thin right now."

"_Your_ patience? You just condemned billions of people to die! You put me in the position of having to beg and plead with you for the tiniest bit of mercy toward people I personally despise as much as you do, and in the end, even an entire solar system isn't large enough for three trillion people without massive die-offs. And your justification is that they were retarding the evolution of all the people around them. Well and good, but what about the Borg? Why do you take action against the Devore and not them? Does Pandora need to get assimilated before you step in against the Borg?"

"What, are you asking me to annihilate the Borg?"

"No, I'm asking you to acknowledge that what you just did wasn't your _job_, it wasn't _justice_, because if it was you'd have done it to the Borg! You wanted revenge because they terrified Pandora and they would have killed her. I'm glad to see you love her, Q, but this is wrong. You don't annihilate an entire species because one member of it threatens your baby."

Q puts his hand to his head. "I don't even want to get into explaining how wrong you are and in how many different ways," he says tiredly. "So I'll make this very quick and use very tiny words for your tiny human brain. _Don't presume you know the role of the Borg._ The Borg don't eliminate either genetic potential or collectively acquired knowledge; all they eliminate is the role of the individual, and the individual isn't relevant to the progress of evolution. I may, personally, not be a big fan of the Borg's evolutionary pathway, but they are not necessarily retarding the growth of other species. The Devore are."

"How can a species grow once it's part of the Borg?" Janeway demands.

"Well, it grew into the Borg. Duh. I realize that from your perspective there's a big difference between a species that's not part of the Borg and a species that is, but from the perspective of the Q things look a little different. And I don't have to justify myself to you anyway."

"No, I suppose you don't. But I'd prefer to be able to tell Pandora that her father's people, the people she's destined to join when she grows up, the people who apparently consider her some kind of messiah of peace, are not monsters."

"Is that some kind of _threat?_"

"She's going to be able to read my mind someday, Q. I'd rather she didn't read that I think her father is morally bankrupt."

"You think what you want. You're a primitive, underevolved, pathetic little life form and I'm sure that once Pandora realizes how much better she is than you, she'll ignore all of your idiotic little opinions."

"Just like Amanda Rogers ignored all the idiotic little opinions of the humans around her?"

"Amanda's parents were idiots. _My_ daughter won't be such a fool."

"I hate to tell you this, Q, but when children are raised by a mother, and their father isn't there, they depend a lot on their mother's opinion of their father to form their own ideas. If I think you're a monster, there are good odds Pandora will agree."

"Well, then, _am_ I a monster in your oh-so-important opinion?"

Janeway sits down. "I don't know." She takes a deep breath. "You say you have good reasons for doing what you did. God knows, I didn't like what the Devore were doing to telepaths… and I'm grateful you came to Pandora's rescue. I had no idea they intended to kill her, not so quickly. I was going to hand her over and then launch a rescue mission—"

"I know."

"It would have been too late, wouldn't it have?" She looks up at him. "That's why you're so angry. She's genuinely mortal. Has the Continuum forbidden you to bring her back if she dies?"

"The Q can't bring the Q back, Kathy." He walks over, holding his arms out to take the baby. "Let me have her for a moment."

Janeway hands her over. Pandora is quiet now, almost sleeping. She perks up in Q's presence. "This mortal body she occupies… this is an incubator. Her Q essence is growing within. Destroy the mortal body, and the Q-self is too fragile, too incomplete, to survive. She'd just disintegrate, and a Q is too complex for another Q to restore. I _could_ save the mortal body, but I can't save the baby Q… if I had to resurrect Pandora because she'd been murdered, she wouldn't be a Q anymore. She wouldn't be _mine_ anymore. You could have a baby back, but it might as well be a clone, because the original child would be dead."

"Held hostage to mortality. It must _terrify_ you."

"Well, I may not be allowed to intervene to save _you_, not that you'd necessarily thank me if I did, but I am permitted to protect my daughter. So no, it doesn't terrify me. Usually. My power should be sufficient to protect one baby human."

"But you wouldn't have been nearly as angry or frightened if the Devore had threatened me. Or Picard. And you'd just have laughed if they'd threatened _you_. Even though your power can protect her, you're still… well, you're still her father, I suppose."

"I suppose many human fathers would do the same if they had the power, yes."

"But that's the thing. The Devore are terrified of telepaths because it leads, in the end, to power like yours. And you could do this to three trillion people, all but a handful of whom were innocent of the crime of threatening your daughter, because you love your baby and you got scared. It's admirable to love your child, Q, don't get me wrong, and it's understandable to want to hurt people who threatened her. But Kashyk was _right_. You just justified his life's work." She shakes her head. "You say that the Devore were retarding evolution, and personally, I want to believe you that evolution has a point to it, that we're all going to become superpowerful beings with magic powers and immortality someday. Except, you haven't really used yours very well, have you? I mean, you see the point to evolution as making sentient beings into something like the Q, but the Q just nearly destroyed the galaxy with that war you and I stopped by _having_ that baby. If you can be so small and petty as to have a civil war, why are you the end point of evolution, and who gives you the right to say that no one's allowed to protect themselves from their neighbors or their own kind becoming like you?"

"So it's all right to murder innocent people for the crime of being born telepaths?"

"I don't know, Q. Is it all right to murder innocent people, indirectly by turning their entire planet into a concentration camp, for the crime of being born Devore?"

He shakes his head. "Why do I listen to you?"

"Because you know the Q don't have all the answers. That's why you came to me to have a baby. And speaking of baby, can I have her back now?"

"Oh, but she's so cute. She's trying to grab my teeth." He play-chomps Pandora's exploring finger, and she giggles and gets it out of the way. "No, no, q-ling. Daddy's teeth are not for forcible extraction by baby fingers. Here, Mommy wants you anyway."

He teleports Pandora into Janeway's arms. She squeals with delight. "'Gen!"

"No, we're not teleporting again right now. Daddy's gotta go home." He looks at Janeway. "I'll check in on them and see what I can do. I have to keep them locked up so they learn to stop killing their telepaths – or other people's telepaths – but I don't have to leave them entirely to their own devices. I can do what I can to prevent uncontrolled die-offs, make sure they have enough resources to survive their punishment more or less intact as a species. Try to facilitate them changing their behavior quickly so I can let them out on parole."

"Thank you," Janeway says. "I appreciate that you're willing to listen to me on this."

"Well. We're stuck working together for the next sixteen years or so, right? I suppose I can't go have a baby with a human because I wanted to bring human traits to the Continuum and then whine that I don't like it when humans act human."

"No, that would be rather hypocritical." She smiles. "Pandora, can you say 'bye-bye' to Daddy?"

Pandora waves. "Bye-bye!" she says, quite clearly.

_Bye-bye_, he sends back telepathically – if she's already starting to demonstrate active psi, then the sooner she's trained to receive telepathically, the better—and waves.

And then he returns to the Continuum.


	11. Eleven: Crew Q

This is not going the way Q had hoped it would. When he'd offered to join Picard's crew, he had assumed he would be having the conversation with Picard himself. Not Riker, who'd caused him no end of embarrassment by turning him down last time, not Troi, who had practically solved the Farpoint puzzle for Picard and his crew all by herself, and _certainly_ not Guinan. In fact he probably should have checked the ship more carefully, but who would have ever imagined his old nemesis to be _here?_ It almost makes him want to believe in Guinan's concepts of fate and destiny, if a particularly malign destiny and a fate with a sense of humor.

"Ready and willing, able to serve. What would you do?" Picard asks. "Would you start as an ordinary crewman? Hmm? What task is too menial for an entity?"

It sounds unpleasantly to Q as if Picard is making fun of the idea that Q could even _want_ to join his crew. "Sir, do you mock me?" he asks, dangerously.

"Not at all. That's the last thing I would do," Picard says. He's absolutely right, of course – it _would_ be the last thing he'd do. Q is willing to tolerate a great deal from this human, but there are standards. "You, by definition are part of our charter. Our mission is to seek out new and different life forms, and you certainly qualify as one of the most unique life forms I have ever encountered. To learn more about you is frankly quite provocative, but you are next of kin to chaos."

Well. So far, that doesn't sound like "no", exactly. "Captain, at least allow me to present my argument." Picard says nothing, which isn't "no" either. "After our last encounter, I was asked to leave the Q Continuum. Since then, I have been wandering vaguely -- bored really-- my existence without purpose. Then, I remembered the good times I had with you..." This, of course, is a vast oversimplification of the situation.

When Picard and Riker had defeated his Farpoint test, Q was thrilled. So few species ever defeated even the first test, and Q was intrigued by anything new and different. He'd had to play at being stern and disappointed, of course, because that was the role, but even as he'd traded lame quips with Picard that were supposed to sound like sour grapes, he'd been bouncing up and down with excitement, deep inside.

Many others in the Continuum were less so. They'd said they'd wanted humanity tested, but what they'd really wanted was humanity slapped down, because they were afraid of the species. So they told Q to go back and give them a harder test this time. Q had been upset with this – why had he spent centuries building a reputation as a really tough tester, if the rest of his fellows were going to call him a cream puff because _one_ species did beat the initial test? So he'd plotted something that, had it worked, would have greatly annoyed the rest of the Continuum, proven Q's judgement of humanity to be accurate, and given him a permanent ally and a higher status as a mentor instead of merely a tester. Actually giving Riker the powers of the Q _hadn't_ been within his mandate, since he wasn't an authorized mentor yet. But it was impossible to argue that it wasn't a hard test, and he'd figured, once Picard lost and Riker joined the Q, it would be a _fait accompli_ that would automatically prove humanity's worthiness, thus justifying their success at his first test and validating his judgement as a tester.

It hadn't happened that way. Picard had won, Riker had refused, and Q had been left holding the bag, forced to explain to the Continuum why, exactly, he was letting a mortal wield Q powers without authorization, without even the boost that having been successful in the endeavor would have been. He was called reckless, dangerous, his judgement was called into serious question, and they told him to take a hike while they debated what to do about him long-term. And since then, he's spent most of his time observing the site of his downfall, watching the _Enterprise_ as Picard goes about exploring the galaxy. He was watching when Picard defeated yet another Power, the Nagilum this time. And now he knows what he wants.

This man has the power to humble Powers – himself, the Nagilum, who knows who else – with nothing more than the power of his words and his thoughts. His inferior mortal thoughts. That can still defeat a Power. Q has to know how he does it. But it's more than that. He's obsessed now. He _must_ show Picard what he'll be up against in the future, see if Picard can defeat the Borg as handily as he defeated Q and the Nagilum. Q rather suspects not. The El-Aurians had also had a fascinating way with language, had also defeated Q – Q remembers _that_ humiliation well, looking at Guinan – and it didn't help against the Borg.

But Q doesn't _want_ humanity destroyed. He's finding them fascinating. They're unpredictable, they can actually pass his tests, hell, they actually _beat_ him in a contest he was seriously playing to win… He wants to guide them. To help them against the Borg, against whatever else they might encounter. To… what? Be friends with them? Relate to them as if they were Q? It's absurd, and yet… he's so lonely. He never cared that much about spending time with his fellow Q until they cut him off, but now that he's not allowed to go home he desperately misses it. If he spends the time of his exile, until they call him back for their final decision, here with these mortals, well, what will the Continuum do about it? When Q and Q took human form and reproduced, they were only told to come home; they weren't punished until they refused. If Q is ordered home, he has no intention of refusing.

So he genuinely wants to be here. But Riker seems to be having a hard time believing him. "The good times? The first time we met you put us on trial for the "crimes of humanity"..."

"For which you were exonerated," Q points out.

"The next time we saw you, you asked me to join the Q Continuum."

And what about that, Q wonders, makes it hard to believe that he wants to be with these humans? Do they seriously think he would have offered one of them ultimate power, brought them home to show to all his fellows and lived with them for the rest of eternity, if he had no affection for their species? But he can't say that, so he says, "You made a big mistake in not accepting my offer."

He turns toward Picard again. "More and more I realize that here -- here is where I want to be. Think of the advantages. Now, I neither expect nor require any special treatment. If _necessary_, although I can't _imagine_ why, I will renounce my powers and become as weak and incompetent as all of you."

Picard shakes his head. "No," he says.

No. He can't say no. Well, he _can_ say no – Q isn't going to mind control him, that would totally miss the point – but what is Q going to do if he says no? Q has already lowered himself tremendously, humiliated himself in front of the Continuum if any of them are actually looking, by even _making_ this offer. What does Picard want him to do, beg? If he were human, he might have gone pale at the refusal or his desperation might show in his voice, but he's a Q, so he can keep his physical form from showing his emotions to any significant degree. "No? Oh, come on, Captain, in fairness... let me try, I deserve at least that much."

And then Troi speaks up for the first time. "Captain… I think that before you reject him out of hand, we should discuss it together."

Picard blinks, and looks over at Troi. "Counselor… do you think that is necessary? Q is not trustworthy—"

"No, he's not," Troi agrees. "But if he's offering to give up his power to join us… It was different for Will. He could agree to give up the powers of a god because they were new and he hadn't had them his whole life. But for Q, his power must be a fundamental ability, as much a part of him as my empathy. And I have to say that if I were to offer to give up my empathic powers for something, it would have to be something I wanted _desperately_."

Q's eyes narrow. He reviews his shielding. Did he slip the tiniest bit in front of the empath? He'd almost forgotten she was there, but her psychobabble sounds far, far too much like what he'd actually been feeling for his comfort. "I wouldn't describe myself as _desperate_, Counselor."

"Well, were you serious about offering to give up your powers, then?" Troi asks him. "Because for me, giving up my empathy would be like willingly putting my own eyes out, and your powers are so much greater than mine, I would have to imagine it would be _very_ painful for you to do without them. Why would you want to join our crew so much that you'd agree to, in essence, blind and cripple yourself, if you're not desperate?"

"Be very careful, Counselor," Guinan says softly. "He's dangerous."

And now Troi has put him in an impossible bind. Because she's right – actually giving up his powers _would_ be a hardship for him. He's never seriously thought about what it would entail, but he knows that Q and Q couldn't manage to do it and they had a baby to distract them. But now he's in a position where he either says that he never really intended to give up his powers – which, to be honest, he never really did because he never thought Picard would actually say he had to – or he has to admit to the desperation he feels. But if he lashes out at her for intuiting (or sensing… he's still not sure his shields didn't slip) the truth, then he lives down to Guinan's expectations of him.

So he laughs. "Oh, come now, do you think that a Q can't live without being omnipotent? You mere mortals do it all the time. I'm a more advanced being; of course I can do without my powers for a short while, if I choose."

"A short while?" Picard asks. "So you saw this… this stint as a member of my crew as a finite thing, then."

"Well, of course it's finite. You're mortal. I can put my powers aside and not use them, if I choose, but I can't make myself able to die; only the Continuum can do that. I could be with your crew until you're a doddering old man and it would still only be a short while, for me."

"Captain, you're not seriously considering his offer," Riker says disbelievingly.

"Well, Number One, Counselor Troi makes a good point. If this is some sort of test of our willingness to abuse Q's power, again, only he's offering to wield the power himself at our behest instead of giving it to one of us directly… then he's either not really going to be willing to go without his powers, or accepting him without his powers ends the test. But if he's serious… then perhaps he deserves serious consideration. We know nothing about his species, and moreover, we know nothing about his _kind_ of species. The galaxy is full of such beings of tremendous power – we recently encountered one, with the Nagilum. Earlier Starfleet crews met gods. There are the Organians, the Melkotians, the Thasians, whatever Trelane of Gothos was… an entire _type_ of sentient life that we have never had any way to study, or even have a reasonable interchange of ideas with, because they are all vastly more powerful than we are and have had no interest in talking to us about themselves.

"But Q is here. He represents a kind of life we know nothing of, and he claims to be willing to live among us as one of us, to be a member of our crew, working beside us. I have no idea whether he's being honest or not, and to be truthful, there _is_ no way any of us can tell that. Originally I thought this was simply a variation of the same test he forced on us last time… and besides, he kidnapped me away from the _Enterprise_ for several hours. That didn't incline me kindly toward _anything_ he'd ask." He glares at Q, who shrugs and grins embarrassedly. "So I had intended to say no. But Counselor Troi does make an excellent point. _If_ Q is sincere, then he wants this a great deal. If he wants this a great deal, he may be inclined to behave himself. And _if_ he behaves himself, his presence here would be incredibly valuable, simply from the insights we could gain about his people and the kind of beings they are."

"I would think this over _very_ carefully before agreeing to anything, Picard," Guinan warns. "Q is the quintessential genie in a bottle. Before you make any wishes of him, you'd better think hard about how you're going to get him back in that bottle, if you can."

"Oh, as if they could," Q sneers. "Guinan, if I wanted to make everyone on this starship dance the mambo out the airlock, I could do it. There is _nothing_ Picard can _make_ me do unless I agree to do it. There are no magical rules I have to operate by, no three wishes and I'm free, no going back to the fifth dimension if I say my name backwards… I do what I choose. Picard should be thinking more about how to get me to agree to whatever terms he wants to give me, and less about how he could, I don't know, somehow _contain_ me, as if he could."

"That's true," Picard says. "We can't make you do anything. If I say no, you're perfectly capable of kidnapping me and holding me hostage until I say yes."

"That's a ridiculous idea. I'm perfectly capable of mind-controlling you until you say yes. But I wouldn't do that either." If he says no, Q will _show_ him why saying no is a very bad idea. But he won't kidnap him to coerce an answer. That would be no better than mind control. When Q changes someone's mind, he does it by forcing new information on them, not by simply making them mouth the words of agreement. Kidnapping Picard in the first place was necessary just to get in the door, but it wasn't an elegant solution and Q wishes he'd been able to come up with a better idea.

"Why not? You kidnapped me and held me hostage to force me to agree to hear you out."

"That was different. As long as you held me to the terms of our agreement, I couldn't even come aboard your ship. You had to let me aboard before I could even make my argument. Otherwise I could have said I wanted to join your crew and you'd have just said that I can't because I'm not allowed on your ship."

"And what prevents you from kidnapping me or doing something else unpleasant to me any time we make an agreement you decide you don't want to abide by? It doesn't mean much that you stand by your word if you're willing to harass me to force me to let you out of any agreement we've made."

Q takes a deep breath, although technically he doesn't need to. "If you're afraid of me doing something like that, then just make me agree _not_ to. It's really simple, Picard."

"I don't think anything about you is simple, Q. Are you saying that you feel honor bound to keep to the letter of your word, so the way to keep you from violating the spirit of it is to construct my request in such a way that there's no way out for you?"

"It works for the Continuum."

"If it works for the Continuum, why'd they have to kick you out?" Riker asks. Q rolls his eyes, but doesn't dignify that with an answer.

"More to the point, Q, you're a highly advanced being with abilities whose full scope I have no grasp of, and probably an intellect that's vastly beyond me. How do I come up with an agreement that will actually bind you, without you being able to find a way around it?"

"Simple. You tell me that anything I want to do to you, your crew, your species, or anyone you care about, I have to get your permission first, or the deal is off and I have to leave the crew."

Picard studies him for a minute. "And if you constructed that because you're aware of a loophole I can't see, how would I ever know?"

"I suppose you wouldn't. But trust has to start _somewhere_, doesn't it?"

"Are you aware that I actually care a great deal about every sentient species in the galaxy? Including the ones that I haven't met yet?"

Q laughs aloud. "Oh, Picard, you do yourself too little credit. You _do_ know how to play this game." He leans forward. "If it helps any… if I were malicious you'd be dead. I may be, shall we say, more _playful_ than you'd like. But I'm not out to get you. If you slip up and leave me a loophole to do something you wouldn't like… it would have to be something I _wanted_ to do. I wouldn't just do it to make you upset; you honestly don't have that much control over me. I might do what I want, or I might do what I've agreed to do for you, but I'm not going to do something I don't want to do _solely_ because you don't want me to do it."

"Well, that may be helpful, but I haven't a clue of what the parameters of what you don't want to do might be."

"Okay." Q gestures with both hands. "I don't believe in killing mortals directly. It's not funny, it's tasteless and overdone. So if you accidentally say something like, say, 'If only we didn't have to deal with the Romulans anymore,' I am not going to go kill all the Romulans or disappear them or turn them into chartreuse wombats and then come back and pretend I thought you ordered me to do it. Well, I might turn them into chartreuse wombats, but probably only for a day or so, and then I'd probably make them all forget I did it."

"You weren't overly concerned with our people suffering and dying last time."

Q shrugs. "I didn't say I _cared_ if mortals die. I'd just be a giant bleeding heart if I did, given how often you people do that. But _I_ won't be the one to kill them."

"You've never killed anybody?" Riker says. "I find that hard to believe. Your animal creatures ran Wesley through with a bayonet!"

"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist healing him."

"What if I did? Resist? Or I didn't realize how to do it?"

"Well, since the idea that was paramount in your mind was stopping my little scenario and saving Wesley's life, if you actually hadn't used the powers I lent you to do it, I'd have done it for you and then convinced you that it was your subconscious mind that did it." He claps a hand to his mouth theatrically. "Oh, dear me, here I am giving away trade secrets and we don't even have a deal yet!" He looks at Picard. "_Do_ we have a deal, _mon capitaine?_ Or am I wasting my time here?"

"What do you really want, Q?"

"I thought I'd made it clear what I really wanted."

"No, you haven't. You say you want to join our crew. That you're _willing_ to give up your powers, if you must, but you hardly sound enthused with the prospect. But I was quite serious when I asked you, at first, do you want to be an ordinary crewman? Writing reports, adjusting outputs, climbing around in the Jeffries tubes and reconnecting wires? Much of the work that's done aboard a starship is very menial and tedious, and I have an even harder time imagining you choosing tedious, repetitive work than I can imagine you giving up your power."

"Well…" Q hasn't ever actually thought about that. "Yes. I'm very easily bored, I'm afraid. I didn't come here hoping to get a job doing paperwork, no. Although, if I had to, I'm sure I could manage."

"Then what job were you hoping to get, Q? 'The crew' includes a very wide range of duties. What kind of work were you hoping I would give you, if I accepted your offer?"

"I want to be your guide," Q says promptly. And then wonders if he's said too much.

"Our guide? In what way?"

"Listen, Picard." Q hoists himself up onto the bar and sits on it, looking down on Picard. "The universe is full of dangers you can't even imagine. And wonders you would weep to behold. And many of them, you're going to run into whether I'm there or not. But I want to be there when you see them. And if they're something that will _crush_ you like a bug – and there is no shortage of dangers in this universe that can do that, no matter how advanced and prepared you think you are – I want to give you the advice you need to avoid them or escape them or defeat them. And if there are things that would amaze you to know or to see, but you'll never see them because they're halfway across the universe, I want to take you there and show them to you. All of you. Because you're _explorers._ Because you're here to see the wonders of the universe. Because you'll appreciate them. Because you can still feel amazement when you see something you've never seen before."

"And you can't?" Troi says softly.

Q smiles wryly, bitterly. His shield _is_ leaking. He's pretty sure of it. Time away from the Continuum has weakened him already. She's reading him too well. But there's no sense denying it. "I would love nothing more than to see something I've never seen before, Counselor. But I've seen everything. And everyone I know well has _also_ seen it all. There's nothing new to see, and no one to show what I already know to. Is it so hard for you to imagine I might actually _enjoy_ showing you lesser beings around the galaxy? Since I've got nothing better to do at the moment, anyway?"

"Hmm." Picard considers. "If that is the role you want to play… you'd need your powers for that, certainly."

"Well, yes. But like I said, I was going to take what I can get. Even without my powers I can still advise you to a certain extent. I still have millions of years of knowledge on my own, even without powers."

"Then I will consider your application, provisionally. If you can agree to terms."

He hops off the bar. "Terms? Hit me. What've you got?"

"Agree that you will not use your powers unless two senior staff members – myself and Mr. Data, myself and Commander Riker, Commander Riker and Mr. Data if I am incapacitated, or other senior staff based on the chain of command if something should happen to us – agree to permit it."

"What about passive powers? I can't tell there's a meteorite heading right for us unless I'm looking."

"All right, you may use any sense you have that does not intrude on the privacy of sentient beings. You may not spy on crew members in their private quarters, you may not spy on other sentient beings in any situation in which they expect privacy, and you may not read anyone's mind without permission."

"Troi doesn't ask for permission."

"Counselor Troi is only an empath. Telepaths in Starfleet, or civilian telepaths working with Starfleet crews, have specific regulations they must follow that empaths aren't covered by."

"Okay. And what about using my powers to avoid, say, having to eat?"

"Would you have to eat without your powers?"

"This is a human body. Gotta fuel it somehow."

"You may also use your powers on yourself, for your personal comfort. You may use your powers in any way that would essentially duplicate the functions of the replicator in circumstances where the replicator is used – creating clothes for yourself, decorating your quarters, etc. You will, however, be expected to abide by the dress code for civilian advisors, which means you won't be permitted to dress as a Starfleet captain anymore."

"All right. I can accept that."

"As a civilian, you are outside the chain of command, but as a passenger on this vessel, you are obligated to take orders from myself, Commander Riker or Mr. Data. Or Dr. Pulaski if they pertain to a medical issue that you have, although I can't imagine that will come up in your case. You must also obey any instructions you're given by a department head in their department, unless those instructions involve using your powers to do anything other than leave the department."

"Like what? If I go into engineering and your Mr. LaForge asks me to put a pot on my head and dance around the room—"

"Now you're being ridiculous. Our department heads are professionals. No one will tell you to do anything unless it is necessary. If you feel you're being harassed, you have the same recourse any other civilian employee does – you may tell Counselor Troi, who is the head of the Personnel Relations department, or myself, or Commanders Riker or Data."

"So you'd consider me a civilian employee, then?" Q grins. "Do I get paid?"

"Q, if you've done half the research on our Federation that you claim, you should know we no longer use money. And since you don't have Federation citizenship or an identity within our system, it would be rather hard to create an account for you to receive credits… and rather pointless, since most of the services people use credits for are things you can do for yourself."

"So you don't want to pay me."

"Not particularly, no. Is that a difficulty?"

He has to rein it in. He would love to tease Picard some more – the whole contradiction between the Federation's stance that they don't have money, and the fact that they obviously do, is hilarious – but he doesn't want Picard to balk at having him at the last second. "I suppose it isn't, no." A thought occurs to him. "What if the ship is about to be destroyed within the next nanosecond and I don't have time to ask you for permission to use my powers? Am I supposed to let you get blown up?"

Riker said, "You can stop time, Q. Can't you?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact I can. Locally, anyway."

"Then just stop time before we get blown up, and ask for permission. That's not so hard for you, is it?"

"You want me to _stop time_ to ask permission to save you from being _destroyed_. What, were you ever expecting a situation where you'd say no?"

"Commander Riker is right, Q," Picard said. "The issue isn't whether or not we wouldn't grant permission. The issue is whether or not you would arbitrarily do something and then claim you had to do it because otherwise the ship would have blown up. We need to establish an iron-clad principle that before using your powers on anyone but yourself, you need to ask permission _every single time_, without exception."

"But stopping time does use my powers."

"And we are pre-emptively granting you permission to use that power in order to have time to ask permission. For one thing, if you simply take it under your own judgement to do whatever you think you need to do to save the ship, there may be consequences that don't matter to you, but would matter to us. You need to ask permission because we may need to tell you to do something different to the _specific_ thing you had planned to do. For example, teleporting a quantum mine away from the _Enterprise_ might still leave it in the path of other ships, so we might want to advise you to disintegrate it instead."

"I'm not stupid, Picard. I could think of disintegrating it instead of teleporting it myself."

"But I don't know what your values are. I am sure you can think of any number of things, but are they the things we in Starfleet would prefer that you do? This won't work if you do whatever you want and then claim you had to. For that matter, I am also going to say that if you propose an intervention with your powers, or we ask you to do something, you need to make any and all possible consequences clear to us before we make a decision. Since we don't have your powers, we can't know as well as you might what impact a particular action could have."

"Oh, for the love of… you want me to write you an _impact analysis_ before I do anything. I might as well still be in the Continuum, submitting reports in triplicate!"

Picard merely looks at him. "You're free to refuse the deal and go anywhere else in the universe you'd like if I give you terms you feel you can't or don't want to meet."

Q sighs, making sure everyone knows how put-upon this makes him feel. "_Fine_. I will give you the impact analysis. Happy?"

"Does the Continuum actually make you submit reports in triplicate?" Riker asks, in a "you're putting us on" voice. "Seriously?"

"Seriously… they aren't in triplicate. Otherwise, no, I'm not making this up. Any action you want to take, you've gotta research what the possible consequences could be, and report it to the rest of the Continuum. Although I can't see how I could write the same kind of report for you… your tiny little brains couldn't handle it. I mean, I can't very well give you a report with the memory of running a 4,000 year simulation attached to it."

"No, I imagine that the format the Q can accept information in would be very different than the formats we can work with. But you have proven to be a creative entity. I think you can manage," Picard says.

"Yeah, I suppose it's easier. The most you could handle is the equivalent of three lines of the top level summary, so I guess it's a lot less work to tell you what something might do than to tell the Continuum. Although I'll have to do a lot more spelling things out and hand-holding."

"Well, you wanted the role of our guide. You'll simply have to deal with the fact that we're less intelligent than your comrades if you want to show us anything."

"Yeah, I guess I can't complain that humans are utter morons when I'm volunteering my services to help you become just an infinitesimal fraction less moronic in the first place."

"Well, then. My last condition is that you agree to obey all the relevant laws and regulations that govern the conduct of civilian employees of Starfleet aboard starships, so long as you are part of this crew. Any violation of those rules or laws will immediately end this contract."

"Done." Q puts out his hand. "Shake on it?"

"I don't think that's necessary," Picard says.

"I think you're making a mistake, Picard," Guinan says softly. "You really can't trust Q at all."

"I understand your point, Guinan. But anything he could do to me in 3 months of close proximity, he could do to me right now… he doesn't actually _need_ to gain our trust to destroy us. I'm sure you're familiar with the Earth saying, 'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.' If Q _does_ wish to be an enemy… better to keep him close where we have some vague idea what he's up to, rather than off at a distance where he can still do whatever he wants and we have no hope of seeing it coming."

"There are dangers other than death and destruction, though. Some dangers… are more personal."

Q can't be silent about that any more. "Oh, yes, such as the danger that I might actually trust _them_ and end up betrayed? I suppose you'd know nothing about that, would you?"

"Yes, you, the omnipotent immortal, are the one who was betrayed. Do you even realize how ridiculous that sounds?"

"It only sounds ridiculous because you're twisting it around to sound ridiculous."

"Q, Guinan." Picard's voice is sharp. "Unless either of you would like to explain, in detail, exactly what happened between the two of you two hundred years ago, I will ask you to stop sniping at each other. Without knowing what happened between the two of you, I have no way of knowing whose assessment of the situation is more accurate… though I will say, Q, that your description of Guinan doesn't seem to bear any reality to the person I know. In fact your description of Guinan sounds suspiciously like a description of _you_."

"Oh, you know her so well, Picard. You met her what, thirty years ago? Forty, tops? I've seen a side of her you're never going to see, because she's much better at pulling the wool over mortals' eyes."

"Or, because Captain Picard is a good and decent man, and I won't be forced to protect myself from him the way I had to do with you," Guinan shot back.

"Protect yourself from _what?_ I never did anything to you!"

"That's an interesting definition of 'anything' you've got there."

"I _said_, both of you, stop sniping at each other!" Picard snapped. "Do either of you actually want to tell me all the details of your dealings with one another?"

Q folds his arms and looks down at the ground angrily. "No," he says sulkily.

"I'm sorry, Picard, but… it's actually not any of your business," Guinan says gently.

"Then stop making it my business. I do not want the two of you fighting with each other in public, making coy allusions to your shared history without ever explaining what you're actually talking about to anyone else. If you must fight, do it in privacy and on your own time. And Q, it should go without saying that if you go out of your way to start fights with Guinan or harass her, our deal is off. That behavior would be out of bounds for a civilian employee."

"Oh, believe me, I'm hardly going to seek her out."

"Very well, then. Counselor Troi, can you make sure Q is assigned some sort of private quarters, so he doesn't go manufacturing his own room?"

"You said I can decorate my quarters whatever way I want, right?"

Picard sighs. "Don't do _anything_ to gravity. It'll throw off our inertial dampeners."

Q grins. "Oh, don't worry. Nothing I'm planning to do to my quarters will affect the rest of the ship _at all._" He leans forward. "As soon I get through whatever tedious hazing ritual of paperwork you're going to make Troi put me through, I need to talk to you. I've got something specific you need to know about, and the sooner the better."

"Fine. Meet me in my ready room once you're settled in." Picard turns to Riker. "Shall we return to the bridge, Number One?"

"Sure. Let's go, sir." Riker and Picard head for the door.

"It's not really a hazing ritual, Q. I just have to make sure you're assigned a room in the computer, that's all," Troi says.

As Q walks off with Troi, he hears Riker asking Picard, as soon as they're out of human earshot of him, "Sir… what the _hell_ were you thinking?" and grins. This really does promise to be marvelously entertaining.

He starts plotting out how he'll demonstrate the threat of the Borg to them without violating their laws, making Picard angry with him, or tipping off the Borg. Maybe some out-of-phase time travel so they can observe a world being destroyed by the Borg without being able to affect the past… oh. Oh, yes. His grin gets bigger. Use the _El-Aurian_ homeworld. The fact that Picard knows an El-Aurian personally will make the emotional impact stronger, and the case he'll then make to Starfleet stronger, without having to threaten Picard himself. And it'll twist the knife in Guinan's wounds, and she won't be able to do a thing about it, because the only kind of time travel her people would ever approve of _is_ passive observation without the possibility of interference… she'll be there, in position to see her world destroyed again, and be unable even to ask for the power to intercede because it would violate every belief she has. Oh, that'll work beautifully.

Yes, this adventure aboard Picard's ship could well be the most fun he's had in millennia.


	12. Twelve: Unexpected ConseQuences

The voices of the Continuum are not amused. "Q. WHY HAVE YOU BROUGHT THIS HUMAN AMONG US?"

Okay. This might actually be more of a problem than he'd thought it would be. "Because I believe that his species is worth much more in-depth study than You had intended to give it, and I believe the best way for us to truly understand them is to make one of them into one of us."

"Wait, _you_ think?" Riker whispers, as if the entire Continuum can't hear him. "I thought you guys all agreed on this."

"Shut up, Riker, let me do the talking."

"MAKING A MORTAL INTO A Q IS ACCEPTABLE IF THE MORTAL ITSELF HAS BEEN ASSESSED BY THIS BODY AND DEEMED WORTHY, BUT YOU HAVE SUBMITTED NO SUCH REQUEST FOR ASSESSMENT. IT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE TO BRING A NEW Q INTO OUR CONTINUUM SIMPLY BECAUSE HIS SPECIES IS WORTHY OF _STUDY_."

"Well, obviously I think he's worthy to join the Continuum or I wouldn't have brought him in. That goes without saying. I'm talking about the benefit to us _beyond_ the benefit of new blood and new perspectives, which I had assumed everyone in the Continuum would understand without my having to point it out."

"THE ISSUE IS NOT WHETHER OR NOT WE NEED NEW BLOOD AND NEW PERSPECTIVES. THE ISSUE IS WHETHER THIS PARTICULAR SET OF PERSPECTIVES IS VALUABLE, AND IF THIS INDIVIDUAL HAS THE MENTAL STABILITY AND STRENGTH OF WILL TO SURVIVE THE CONTINUUM. YOU HAVE NOT TESTED HIM."

"I've been watching him! I didn't need to set up a specific test, I had his whole life to look at! Besides, this one's special. He's got a control."

"What do you mean, I've got a control?" Riker asks.

"Yes, Q, by all means do explain," one of the individuals within the Continuum says. "What do you mean, he's got a control?"

"Well, if we want to study a species by making one of them into one of us, you are all aware of the well-known problem that the individual will change as they become more influenced by the Continuum, and some of the traits of the original species will vanish. But this mortal has an identical copy, created by an accident with their 'transporter' three of their years ago, trapped on a deserted world. We simply bring _that_ William Riker out of his accidental exile and return him to his real life. He can take this William Riker's place among the humans, and by comparing our new Q to his human counterpart, we can identify what aspects of his nature are specifically human versus what aspects change under the pressure of the Continuum."

"You never mentioned this!" Riker says indignantly. "Don't you think I'd have liked to know that there's some sort of… _copy_ of me somewhere? How did that even happen?"

"A malfunction in your primitive little matter transmission devices. And I _said_ be quiet. I'm trying to talk to the Continuum here."

"Yeah, it sounds to me like you're trying to talk them into accepting me. But I was under the distinct impression, when you made your offer, that the offer was coming from _all_ of you, not just you personally."

"Well, there's not always a lot of difference between the two concepts."

"FOR MOST Q THIS IS TRUE, BUT IT IS DISINGENUOUS FOR _YOU_, Q, TO IMPLY THAT YOU SPEAK WITH OUR VOICE. YOU HAVE NOT ALWAYS SEEN EYE TO EYE WITH THE REST OF THIS BODY."

"In fact," another individual voice says, "let's replace 'always' with 'practically ever'."

"THE EXISTENCE OF A COPY OF THIS HUMAN WOULD INDEED MAKE THIS A WORTHY EXPERIMENT, _IF_ IT WERE ACCEPTABLE TO CREATE A NEW MEMBER OF THIS BODY TO JOIN US AND BE PART OF US FOR ALL OF ETERNITY AS PART OF AN EXPERIMENT… BUT IT IS NOT."

"I don't know, I think it's a very interesting experiment," one of the scientists says. "We didn't create the copy, but Q's research indicates that it is in fact identical. We've never had such a control for a new Q. Can we turn down the opportunity?"

"We're going to be stuck with this guy for the rest of eternity," another individual points out. "Of _course_ we can turn down the opportunity, if he's not worthy to be a Q. Experiments are finite, but joining the Continuum is forever."

"Do we actually know he's not worthy? Q didn't test him," yet another individual says.

"Q didn't test him, therefore we know that we don't know if he's worthy or not and therefore _he should not be here!_ This isn't rocket science, people."

One of the Q who can always be relied on to argue against anything Q proposes says, "I can't believe anyone would actually consider it a possibility that we should let this stand! Q has been completely irresponsible, _again_. It's one thing not to do the required study and request permission ahead of time when intervening with mortals; that's bad enough, but it doesn't affect _us_. But this person will have an influence on us for the rest of time! Doesn't anyone else think we needed more than just Q's word for it that this will be a good idea?"

"Actually I think everyone else thinks we needed more than just Q's word for it, except for Q the scientist."

"I think we can handle any negative consequences of having him among us," the scientist says, "but the opportunity to learn something we didn't actually already know comes up so rarely nowadays, we shouldn't turn it down."

"I agree," one of Q's friends and frequent allies says. "Knowledge should be paramount. If this guy doesn't work out, we can always take the powers away again."

"Half a million years after everyone he knows is dead?" someone else asks skeptically. "Why not just prevent the issue by doing the tests we need now?"

The meeting dissolves into its usual cacophony, with everyone talking at once. Q, of course, can follow all the conversational threads at once and answer the ones he considers particularly important to address, but Riker is lost. "This isn't what I signed up for," he says. "The whole reason I joined you guys was because you told me you'd decided that your people were offering it to me. I didn't know it was just you personally and I was going to have to deal with several thousand people who don't seem to want me around. And I sure as hell didn't plan to be your _science_ experiment."

"Hey, I told you that the offer was so that we could study humanity more closely. It's not my fault you weren't paying attention."

"Study humanity, yes. Compare me against an exact duplicate as a control? Tell me the truth, Q. Would you even have looked at me as a possible candidate to join you if I _didn't_ have an exact duplicate?"

"Well, you were pretty interesting at Farpoint."

"Lots of Starfleet officers would have done the exact same thing under the circumstances, but I didn't see you offering them godlike power."

"Your captain didn't."

"My captain would have done the same as I did if he hadn't been the captain. Starfleet used to have a serious problem with captains risking themselves on away missions; I made it clear to Captain Picard when I came on board that I wasn't going to let him risk himself. But if he'd been the first officer, he'd have done just what I did."

"He thinks being human is the pinnacle of all evolution. He'd never have taken my offer."

"You never offered it to him, so how would you know? And besides, _I_ wouldn't have taken your offer if I'd known you were going to get in trouble with your folks at home."

"I'm thrilled that you're so concerned for my well-being, Riker, but I'm not in trouble."

"I'm not concerned for your well-being, I'm concerned for mine. I'm not a big fan of the idea of joining you guys, watching everyone I love die, and _then_ being thrown out again half a million years from now when I can't possibly adjust to being human again. And don't tell me that's not on the table, because I heard someone make that exact suggestion before everyone started talking at once."

"It wasn't a serious suggestion. You just don't understand how we work yet."

"Maybe so… but you certainly don't act like I'd expect highly advanced beings to act."

"Oh, I'm crushed that we've disappointed you. I'm sure you were an expert on how highly advanced beings act before you came here. Undoubtedly you have _vast_ experience on the subject."

"I don't have any experience on the subject. But I've got a lot of experience in how we mere mortals act. And aside from the fact that I can hear that you're having at least twenty different conversations at the same time as you're talking to me, which I'll admit seems pretty advanced, I don't actually see any difference between how you behave and any other council or conference of mortals who can't manage to agree on something."

"What, did you think we sat around for eternity contemplating our own ineffable navels? We do have lives and personalities, you know."

"I can see that. I can also see that your own people don't seem to be any more impressed with you than Captain Picard was."

"Riker, do you seriously think I care about Captain Picard's opinion? If you hadn't made it a condition of your coming here that I had to release him from the terms of our bet, he'd be squashing grapes on his brother's vineyard right now."

"Yeah, and that's another thing. If it hadn't been for my accidentally reading the captain's mind, I'd have never known you made a _bet_ with him about what I was going to choose. It really didn't impress me to learn that me choosing to leave my old life behind and become a completely different species is something you treat like a game, that you can take _bets_ on. I was going to let it go, but then we got here and the Continuum started chewing you a new one. Did you invite me to join you because you genuinely think I deserve to be one of you, or were you just trying to get one up over my captain?"

Q doesn't dignify that with an answer. The whole time he's been bickering with Riker, he's also been trying to defend himself to the Continuum, and listening to their various arguments with each other as to the merit of his positions. Now the Continuum appears to be coalescing around a single point of view, as it usually does after debate. "Quiet, Riker, they're about to come to a decision."

"Q. WE HAVE HEARD YOUR ARGUMENTS AND HAVE COME TO A CONSENSUS."

Q always does his best to hide his apprehension in front of the Continuum if he fears the debate won't end in his favor, but right now it's even more imperative to present a front of confidence. He's got to look good in front of the mortal, after all. "It's about time."

"THIS IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE TIME TO BE FLIPPANT, Q."

"You never think it's an appropriate time to be flippant."

"THIS IS A PARTICULARLY BAD TIME."

"Fine, fine. So noted. What is Your verdict?"

"WHEN WE SENT YOU TO STUDY HUMANITY, WE GRANTED YOU THE RIGHT TO SPEAK WITH OUR VOICE, AS WE DO WHEN WE SEND ANY Q ON A MISSION FOR US. YOUR CHOICE TO BRING THIS HUMAN INTO THE CONTINUUM WAS ILL-ADVISED, POORLY RESEARCHED, AND A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE RULES THAT BIND US ALL. HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT RESCIND THE OFFER YOU HAVE GRANTED; THAT VIOLATES THE PRINCIPLE BY WHICH A Q SPEAKS FOR THE CONTINUUM. YOU ARE A FULL EQUAL AND YOUR WORD WILL BE RESPECTED."

"Well, thank You for _small_ favors."

"WILLIAM RIKER WILL BE INDUCTED INTO THE Q CONTINUUM AS ONE OF US, ON A PROBATIONARY BASIS. HE WILL BE GRANTED THE SAME LEEWAY AND OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN OUR LAWS THAT WE HAVE GRANTED OTHER INDUCTEES IN THE PAST."

"That's certainly fair. I accept that."

"HOWEVER, YOUR RECKLESSNESS AND DISREGARD FOR OUR RULES MUST HAVE CONSEQUENCES."

"Let's be fair, now. They're _rules_, not laws. I haven't broken a single one of our laws."

"TRUE. BUT YOU HAVE BROKEN ALMOST EVERY RULE WE HAVE. REPEATEDLY. DESPITE FREQUENT WARNINGS. YOU ARE RAPIDLY APPROACHING THE POINT OF DISCONTINUITY."

They couldn't be serious. "What? _No!_ I'm not discontinuous – I have every respect for this body. But You gave me leeway to exercise my own judgment, and I did. _I_ thought Riker would make a good Q, I still do, and I didn't think that doing a lengthy analysis and study was going to teach us anything that we didn't already know. That doesn't mean I've turned discrete!"

"YOU HAVE NOT BECOME A DISCONTINUITY… YET. BUT YOU ARE FAR, FAR CLOSER THAN YOU REALIZE, AND FAR CLOSER THAN ANY OF US WISH TO TOLERATE. SINCE YOU HAVE BROUGHT A NEW Q AMONG US, WHO ACCORDING TO YOU IS WELL CAPABLE OF INTEGRATING INTO OUR BODY, ACCUSTOMED TO FOLLOWING RULES AND WORKING WITH OTHERS FOR THE GREATER GOOD… UNLIKE YOU… WE WILL REPLACE YOU."

"Wait, _what?_"

"IT IS THE JUDGEMENT OF THIS BODY THAT WE CAN SAFELY REMOVE YOU BEFORE YOU CREATE A DISCONTINUITY, NOW THAT YOU HAVE BROUGHT US A REPLACEMENT."

"You can't _do_ that!" Q stares in horror at the massed minds of the Continuum around him. "Please… I haven't broken our laws. We've never severed anyone for simply refusing to follow our _customs_ before. I – I know I can be something of an iconoclast, but You made me that way because You need someone to question the rules, so they don't ossify around us and make us as stagnant as most of the other Powers in the galaxy. Riker can't serve that function; I brought him because I thought he'd be a good _Q_, not because he can do _my_ job."

"THE VALUE YOU BRING TO THE CONTINUUM IS GREATLY OUTWEIGHED BY THE PROBLEMS YOU CAUSE. WE WILL SEVER YOU FROM THE CONTINUUM AND MAKE YOU MORTAL. BY DOING SO WE WILL AVOID A PAINFUL DISCONTINUITY, END THE TROUBLES YOU HAVE CAUSED US, AND MAKE THE PRINCIPLE CLEAR THAT CUSTOMS AND RULES ARE TO BE OBEYED AS IF THEY WERE LAWS."

"But they're _not_ laws," Q says, pleadingly. "They never were. We didn't put them to a vote, we didn't agree unanimously, that's why they're not laws. You can't just make up a new rule arbitrarily that rules are laws and breaking them is punishable by death!"

"Death?" Riker asks.

He really hasn't got patience to deal with Riker being stupid right now. "What _else_ would you call losing immortality?" he snaps at him.

"Can I say something to all of you?" Riker asks, addressing the Continuum.

"WE HAVE AGREED THAT YOU SHALL BECOME ONE OF US, PROVISIONALLY. THEREFORE, YES, YOU MAY SPEAK."

"Look, I'm getting the distinct impression that I stepped in something here by taking Q's offer. I understand that he didn't follow your protocols in bringing me here. I don't want to disrupt your lives or make things difficult for all of you, and I don't want to be given honors I don't deserve. And as much as Q's been a pain in the neck, he's one of you and I'm not. I really don't think you should throw him out so you can take me in."

One of the individuals of the Continuum speaks, not the entire body at once. "We aren't throwing him out so we can take you in. We are taking you in so we can throw him out. He has been very disruptive, but we do not like to lose any part of our nature, particularly without receiving any value in exchange. If we take you, we take your traits into us, and then we are free to remove his."

"But I've been a Q for billions of years! Riker doesn't have _nearly_ as much to offer the Continuum as I do. I wanted him to be an _addition_, not a replacement!"

"To be honest," Riker says, "I think he's right. I'm only human. I don't have billions of years of experience – I don't even represent all of humanity. I can only give you what _I_ am. And I understand that I can't tell you what to do, and I'm coming into this late and I don't know all the background… but it _does_ seem unfair that you'd throw Q out for doing something that wasn't actually against your laws."

"It isn't _this_ flouting of the rules. It's all of them."

"And I understand that, I do. Hell, I might do the same in your place. But it's not justice. It's not as if you actually told him 'one more screwup and that's it for you, buddy.' I mean, did you?"

"IT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN NECESSARY," the Continuum says.

"I know, it really shouldn't have been. But apparently it was. I'm standing right next to him – I can tell he's sincerely shocked. He really didn't see this coming. And it's not fair to just arbitrarily hand someone out a punishment that they couldn't reasonably expect, and if you've been tolerating his behavior with nothing but warnings and slaps on the wrist for millennia, then of course he can't have reasonably expected that you would suddenly sentence him to death."

"It's not a death sentence," someone mumbles. "It's a sentence to mortality. It's not execution."

"What difference does it make?" Q says, unable to quite keep from snarling. He is utterly humiliated that Riker is defending him, that Riker is even there to see that he needs defending, let alone that he actually seems to be doing better than Q himself is managing. He would snarl at Riker and tell him to shut up and let Q handle it himself except that what's at stake is Q's life, and even as proud as he is, he's too afraid that if he silences Riker he has no hope. So he takes it out on his fellow Q. "It doesn't really matter whether I live three nanoseconds or 80 years after leaving the Continuum, does it? Neither is a whole lot of time. If you make me mortal you _are_ sentencing me to death; don't try to prettify it."

"Why are you defending him?" another Q asks Riker. "He may have brought you to us, but you aren't beholden to him. He has been cruel to you, he has mistreated your friends and yourself in the course of his tests… why stand up for him?"

"It's the principle of the thing," Riker says. "I've been around enough teenagers of my own species to know that you can get fed up with too many minor violations of the rules, and finally you snap and hand out a punishment that's worse than any one violation deserves, because it's for all of them. I do understand that. But that's wrong. It's inconsistent. If punishment is going to have a deterrent effect, then people have to know what kind of punishment to expect before they commit an act, and certainly Q had no idea you were going to throw him out." He shrugs. "Besides, if I do stay with you, I'm going to need him. I don't know anyone else and none of the rest of you have had dealings with my kind, to the best of my knowledge."

"THAT IS NOT TRUE. MANY OF US ARE FAMILIAR WITH HUMANS."

"Okay, then I'm wrong. But Q saw something in _me_ that apparently the rest of you didn't. Unless he's lying, and I was only ever a science experiment, but if that's the case you really should send me back to the _Enterprise_ and take back the powers you've given me. I mean, you know him, so you tell me – did he really see something in me that made it worth it to him to bring me to the Continuum? Because the rest of you don't see it, and I'd like him to stick around so he can help me prove myself to the rest of you. Or I'd like to go home and let him stay here, because I don't really want to be part of a group that tosses out random death sentences for not filing reports on time."

"WERE YOU COERCED TO JOIN US? DO YOU FEEL THAT Q LIED TO YOU TO MAKE YOU ACCEPT?"

Riker shakes his head. "It's not exactly that. I'm an explorer… that's why I joined Starfleet. That's what I was out here for. Ultimate power… I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a temptation, but my understanding is that once I become one of you I will be leaving my human life behind, and among you, I wouldn't actually be omnipotent. Which is fine, because that's not what I'm after. It's the opportunity to learn, to become something greater than I am, to explore everything the universe has to offer. And maybe, yes, to help you see that my people, humans, aren't a threat to you.

"But I would never have accepted if Q had made it clear that I wasn't fully tested by your standards, because I don't want something I don't deserve and I don't want something I can't handle, and I frankly don't want to deal with people thinking of me as the idiot stepbrother they have to be nice to because someone else invited them home, for the rest of eternity. I had a good life, a good career back in Starfleet. I had friends, I had respect. I don't care how much power you offer me, I don't want to live somewhere where no one respects me and I'm treated like an inferior being, especially not for the rest of time. So if that's how it's going to be, I want to go home.

"And if you're going to throw Q out, I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to be. _Some_ of you must be his friends; _some_ of you would come to resent me because I'm not him. I don't share the history, I don't know the in-jokes, I don't have whatever skills he's got. Even some of you who are angry at him now and thinking, yeah, get rid of him, he deserves it… I think maybe some of you might end up having second thoughts tomorrow, or a thousand years from now. If any of you decide, now or later, that you regret getting rid of him, I don't want to bear the brunt of that."

"WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE? Q HAS BROKEN OUR RULES MANY, MANY TIMES, AND INVITING SOMEONE UNTESTED TO BECOME A Q IS THE PINNACLE OF IT. HE MUST BE DISCIPLINED FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE. BUT WHAT YOU SAY HAS SOME MERIT. IF YOU CAN PROPOSE AN ALTERNATIVE, WE CAN TAKE IT INTO ADVISEMENT."

"Well, can the tests he was supposed to do to see if I am worthy to join the Q be done if I've already joined?"

"MOST CANNOT. YOU WOULD KNOW TOO MUCH, HAVING ACCESS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE."

"Then deny me that knowledge. Block it, and test me. If I pass, then Q was right to offer me the position, and you give him back his position. If I fail, then you can throw me out, and at that point do whatever you feel needs doing to him. Throw him out if you can find an adequate replacement, or do whatever you do for a punishment when you're _not_ going so far as to throw people out."

"Q CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO ADMINISTER THE TESTS IF HIS OWN SAFETY IS AT STAKE."

"So let someone else test me. That'd be more fair anyway; now that Q's staked his reputation on me, he'd be biased even if it weren't his life at stake."

"VERY WELL. THE CONTINUUM WILL TAKE YOUR SUGGESTION UNDER ADVISEMENT. NEITHER OF YOU WILL BE PERMITTED TO HEAR THE DELIBERATIONS."

And with that they vanish, leaving Q alone in nothingness with Riker.

"You're not in trouble, huh?" Riker says. "Guess it's a good thing for you I'm still hung up on that human concept of fairness."

"Go away," Q says sullenly.

"I don't think so. For one thing I have no idea where to go or how to get there."

"You can go anywhere in the universe. The Continuum will summon you when they've made their decision." He tries, and fails, to keep his bitterness and fear out of his mental voice.

"I think I'm gonna stay here."

"Planning to rub it in? Oh, yes, let's all gloat at how horribly Q's scheme misfired. I thought bringing you here would solidify my position with them… I thought it would be clear to them the value you can add. I never thought—"

"Yeah. It's pretty obvious you didn't see this coming."

"Laugh it up, monkeyboy. Go ahead, make fun of me."

"I'm not, actually."

A Q would be making fun of him. But Riker isn't quite a Q, yet, and possibly never will be entirely like the other Q. Which is why Q wanted to bring him in, and why this hurts like the slap of a betrayal. If the Continuum throw him out for this, they will be proving once and for all that they prefer process to results; that his best effort to improve the Continuum and encourage its continued growth should not just be rejected, but _spat_ upon, is almost a worse blow than the fear of what will happen to him if they do as they've threatened.

"Why did you defend me, anyway? I know you don't actually like me, even if you did agree to join me."

"Because what they were doing really wasn't fair."

"You may have noticed the Continuum doesn't really have much concern for what is fair and what isn't."

"Yeah. Maybe that's one of those human qualities you secretly wish I'd introduce you guys to. It looks like you could use it."

Q slumps. Riker's right, actually. For all his disdain for humanity and their weaknesses… _he_ was the one who wanted to introduce human traits to the Continuum, after all. And now, it may possibly save his life.

He realizes then that deep down, he never had thought Riker was worthy of being a Q. That he didn't think this through when he started it. That he had been mostly concerned with scoring points against Picard, proving a point to the Continuum, and setting up an intriguing experiment. Riker himself, as a person, really _hadn't_ interested him all that much… Riker was right again, his type is a dime a dozen in Starfleet. He was thinking that he wanted to bring new traits to the Continuum, but he had also been contemptuous of the very traits that he wanted to add. And the Continuum must have seen through him, even as he successfully lied to himself. No wonder they're considering throwing him out.

But ironically Riker has actually risen to the challenge. For the Continuum to even take the word of a mortal under advisement means that Riker's ideas struck a nerve; _someone_ in there thinks that Riker had a good point.

"You're right, actually," he says quietly. "We do need it. Even me… I go out looking for something, anything, that's different. And then I find it and I make fun of it for not being like a Q. But if it was like a Q I wouldn't be interested in it because it wouldn't be _different_. I say I want to change the Continuum, I want to bring new traits in, but I look down on those traits even when I find them. I thought I was the only one who could clearly see that we need to change… but it turns out even my vision was a lot less clear than I thought."

"Will they go through with it, do you think? You know them better than I do."

"I don't know," Q says honestly. "I didn't think they'd do something like this in the first place. I can't believe they'd really do it, but… I wouldn't have believed they'd even threaten it, if I hadn't been standing right there when they did it." He looks at Riker. "You have to understand. We're supposed to be a pure democracy. Everyone's equal, everyone has a voice. We're a Continuum, a unity of thought and mind when we combine as one, a paradox of individualities within a unity. And our laws are fair, and just, because we don't implement them unless we all agree. But… they started making rules, taking customs that lots of people followed because they wanted to be polite and saying that we _have_ to do them, without putting them to a vote. And I thought we all understood that rules and laws are different. Laws exist for a reason. Rules might just be because someone was on a power trip that day and wanted to make a rule, and no one who was there at the time cared enough to object. Rules should _not_ have the same weight as law. They shouldn't be able to sever me from the Continuum just because I break _rules_."

"Well, did you ever think that maybe the rules might have a good reason? That maybe you shouldn't just go breaking them willy-nilly?"

"Oh, you'll get along great with the others." Q scowls. "If they've never been tested and they've never been debated, how can we possibly know they have a good reason unless we test them? And how can we test them if we don't break them?"

"Well, maybe they ought to take the rules and put them up for debate to see if they should be laws."

"They should. They absolutely should. But they never get around to it, because no one cares enough to push it and we're never all here at the same time unless someone pushes."

"Why don't you push it?"

"Because I'm in favor of fewer rules, not more laws, and if I'm the one pushing it half of them will vote to make it a law just to spite me."

"So it isn't your species, then, it's you. Nobody likes you, personally."

"I'm the guy who's supposed to say the Emperor has no clothes. Nobody likes that guy. I've told every single one of them they're butt naked on one occasion or another. But they _need_ me. Or else they're going to be running around the galaxy with their asses on display."

"And it's not because you keep screwing things up by breaking the rules?"

"Yeah, sometimes some bad things happen because I broke a rule or two. And sometimes good things happen. And sometimes we find out that the rule was completely unnecessary. But you know, no one ever remembers when my methods _work._"

The rest of the Continuum flash back in. Showtime. Q straightens up and puts his game face on.

"WE HAVE TAKEN THE SUGGESTION OF WILLIAM RIKER UNDER ADVISEMENT. IN THE MATTER OF HIS FATE, IT SEEMS A FAIR SOLUTION. WE WILL BLOCK HIM FROM THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE TOTALITY OF THE CONTINUUM AND CONDUCT THE TESTS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE BEFORE HE WAS EVER INVITED TO THE CONTINUUM.

"SHOULD WILLIAM RIKER PASS THE TESTS, HE WILL BE INDUCTED INTO THE CONTINUUM AS A FULL MEMBER. THIS WILL REFLECT WELL ON HIS SPONSOR, Q, WHO WILL ALSO BE REINSTATED WITH ALL RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. HOWEVER, SHOULD HE FAIL, HE WILL BE RETURNED TO THE HUMAN WORLD AND HIS HUMAN FORM, WITH NO PENALTY BEYOND THAT FOR HIS FAILURE. HIS SPONSOR WILL SUFFER THE SAME CONSEQUENCE, AND BE EXILED TO MORTALITY. IF THAT SHOULD OCCUR, Q WILL BE PERMITTED TO CHOOSE WHICH SPECIES HE SHALL BE, WHAT FORM HE SHALL TAKE WITHIN THAT SPECIES, AND WHERE HE SHALL GO, WITH THE STIPULATION THAT THE SPECIES IN QUESTION MUST BE MORTAL.

"HOWEVER, Q, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU ARE EVENTUALLY REINSTATED TO THE CONTINUUM OR EXILED PERMANENTLY… YOU MUST SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR RECKLESSNESS. YOU ARE TO BE EXILED FROM THE CONTINUUM FOR THE DURATION OF WILLIAM RIKER'S TESTS. YOU WILL NOT ACT AS OUR AGENT, YOU WILL NOT PRESENT YOURSELF AS SPEAKING WITH OUR VOICE, YOU WILL NOT UNDERTAKE ANY INTERVENTIONS ON ANY MORTAL SPECIES AND YOU WILL NOT ATTEMPT TO RETURN TO THE CONTINUUM OR COMMUNICATE WITH ANY MEMBER. WE WILL SUMMON YOU WHEN THE TESTING IS COMPLETE AND WE ARE READY TO MAKE A FINAL JUDGMENT."

It's not as bad as simply being made mortal would have been. He'll get to keep his powers. But the thought of being deprived of both the Continuum and his work… the Continuum annoys him more often than not and he's not thrilled with being here most of the time, but the idea that he's not _allowed_ to be here hurts. And if he can't intervene with mortals and he can't talk to any other Q, who the hell is he supposed to spend time with? How is he going to stave off boredom if he can't talk to anyone? Not to mention the fact that his entire fate is going to be in Riker's hands, and without being able to talk to any other Q he won't have the foggiest idea how that's going or be able to influence it in any way.

It's horrible. But it's so much better than the other alternative they presented that he swallows his objections. "I accept," he says softly.

"VERY WELL. LEAVE US NOW."

He looks over at Riker. "Yo, Billy. I know getting thrown out of the Continuum probably isn't going to hurt you too badly, but… try to pass the tests, okay?"

"Hey, I don't want some poor mortal species to have to deal with you just because the Q don't want you any more. For all I know if they make you pick a species and a place to go you'll turn yourself human and head for the _Enterprise_ just so you can make my life hell for failing."

"That sounds like a great idea, Riker. You think hard about that, if you feel even slightly tempted to blow this test."

"I won't blow it, Q. I can't promise you I'll succeed, but I'll damn well do my best."

"Well, for both our sakes I sincerely hope that's good enough."

"You must have thought it would be good enough before you decided not to bother testing me."

"I did." He nods. He's lying. He never actually gave any thought to testing Riker because at the time he actually hadn't believed Riker _would_ pass, deep down. But he thinks he might have been wrong, now. Maybe he made the right call for the wrong reasons, and Riker will prove himself worthy. "I'll be back when you're done. Do what you can do."

"I will."

Q leaves, then. He has no idea where he's going to go; without being permitted to intervene with mortals, he can only watch, and he doesn't know what would be entertaining to watch right now. With nothing else to do, he drifts over toward the _Enterprise_. They were amusing to keep an eye on, and maybe from watching the humans he'll get some insight as to whether Riker will pass or not.


	13. Thirteen: Displaced Persons

Q isn't in the room when Picard wakes up. If he were there, Picard would know that he was hovering, and might be able to guess at his desperation, and Q hasn't sunk _that_ low yet. Besides, he can see Picard just fine if he's not in the same room. After materializing Picard on the bed he's created, and putting him into a very very light sleep just to give the human something to ease his disorientation, Q materializes himself out on the porch, in a chair, ostensibly looking down over the mountainside and out at the ocean below. In actuality, of course, he's still watching Picard.

Picard wakes up, plainly startled to find himself here. He explores for a bit, attempts to work his communicator – Q reflects that he probably should have gotten rid of that, but then, maybe getting no response will more quickly drive it home to Picard that the _Enterprise_ isn't around anymore than the lack of the device would have – and finally ends up out on the porch. In a voice that conveys a total lack of surprise, he says, "Q."

Q turns in his chair to face Picard. "Bonjour, mon ami! Sleep well?"

"I'm not your friend. Send me back to my ship."

Q shakes his head. "I can't do that, Jean-Luc. Not this time."

"You mean you won't."

"I mean I won't, because when you understand the situation, you won't want me to. Sanctity of the timeline and the Temporal Prime Directive and all that jazz."

Picard frowns. "What do you mean by that? Are we in a different time?"

"Well, _you_ are. From what you remember, anyway. I'm not, though."

"How can I be in a different time, and not you, when you're right here?"

"You gotta ask yourself, Jean-Luc, different from _what?_ You aren't in the time you remember being because time has passed, and I'm not in a different time because I've been here the whole time it was passing. Immortal, remember?" Well, mostly immortal. He pulls his memory away from that. He doesn't want to think about the exceptions.

"Wait, so… you are your future self? You've pulled me into the future?"

"Mmm… not exactly. What's the last thing you remember?"

"I was beaming down to Sagasea V, with the ambassador and her party. The last thing I remember is the transport beam."

"That's what I figured," Q says, who actually arranged it that way but he's not exactly going to tell Picard that. "See, you never got there."

"Because you intercepted me?"

"No, because there was a pinpoint wormhole in the way and you beamed straight into it. You were declared dead 300 years ago, Picard. The _Enterprise_ had no hope of finding you – they couldn't even detect the wormhole, or the pocket universe it was an opening into. You've been bouncing around a microverse as a beam of energy for the past 300 years, until I finally got around to noticing what had happened to you and pulled you out." There is only one true statement in what he has just said, technically, but the important thing is that Picard understands that he's been dead for 300 years. Knowing the exact details would only cause him unnecessary angst. Picard doesn't know how his own transporter works well enough to know how impossible the story Q has just told him is.

"I've been… dead… for 300 years."

"Is there an echo in here?"

Picard shakes his head. "I don't believe you."

"What's not to believe? I cut you some slack on the whole not believing I was God, Jean-Luc, since I must admit I don't really resemble either a jealous god of wrath or a loving god of fluffy bunnies, ponies and kittens, which are the two major forms of the monotheistic god most of you don't really believe in anyway but it's part of your culture. But exactly what don't you believe about a transporter accident? You people seemed to have one every other day, back in the old days."

"If I suffered a transporter accident 300 years ago, why would you choose to remove me from the pocket universe _now?_ Surely you'd have been more interested in doing so when our acquaintanceship was fresher; if you didn't do it then, why do it now?"

"I was sort of busy at the time." Unwanted, memory trickles back of what he was doing at the time. He forces it down. "Now I've got nothing going on. Six quadrillion channels and nothing good's on the holo. So, you know, I'm kind of bored and I think to myself, 'Hey, Jean-Luc was always good for a few chuckles. Wonder what ever happened to him?' And I checked into it and found out that technically you'd never actually died. So here you are! Aren't you glad I rescued you?"

"Thrilled," Picard says, in that tone that indicates that he isn't thrilled at all. But that's okay. He doesn't have to like Q, he never had to do that. He just has to distract Q from the blackness lurking behind the barriers Q keeps having to fortify in his own mind.

"You should be." Q stands up. "Everyone you know is dead, Picard. Well, except for Guinan, but she hasn't aged well since the Borg destroyed her homeworld; she's only eleven hundred but she's looking nearly two millennia old nowadays. Your Federation still exists, and Earth, but they've changed so much you'd be an anachronism if you went back. You have no one depending on you, no duties to perform, nothing in the universe to hold you back. There's absolutely no reason you can't go exploring the galaxy with me."

"Aside from the obvious reason that I really would rather not?"

"Oh, come on now. When I offered it to you the first time you were tempted, I could tell. But oh, no, Captain Jean-Luc Picard can't go off and do anything _fun_. He has _duties_ to his _ship._ He has several crewmates whose good opinion he cares about who really, truly can't stand me and he doesn't want to face having to tell them, 'oh, yes, actually I _do_ trust Q, sort of, at least a little bit,' and end up with Beverly Crusher assessing him for mental illness. Well, there's no more Crusher or Riker or Worf to look at you funny, Picard. There's no more _Enterprise_ to command, no more duties to Starfleet to carry out. They discharged you of all that the day Crusher signed your death certificate, three hundred and twelve years, six months, two weeks and four days ago."

"Q… your power is tempting. I've never denied that. The freedom to travel the universe on a whim, traverse space and time, with a guide who knows his way… I'm not going to tell you that isn't an attractive idea. But I _am_ going to tell you that I don't think it's worth it to have to put up with you as a companion for all that time. Especially since I saw what you did to Vash. You're arrogant, obnoxious, overbearing and selfish."

"True, all true. But you also think I'm hilarious, fascinating, and exciting. You just have never been willing to admit to any of that in front of your crew. Or in front of anyone. I have news for you, though; I can, in fact, read your mind any time I want to. Yes, I don't use the ability as often as, say, Lwaxana Troi did, since knowing what you're going to do before you do it takes away some of the excitement, and I live for excitement. But I've indulged myself enough to know what you _really_ think."

Picard shakes his head. "All right… if you're going to pull my own thoughts out of my mind to try to win an argument, I will admit it. I do consider you fascinating. I always have. You're an utterly alien life form, and yet, unlike every other life form of your nature, you actually choose to interact with us humans on our own level. I have no way of knowing what parts of you are a performance and what parts truly represent who you are, but you seem to have a surprisingly… _human_ mind for all your power and all the alien aspects of your nature. Understanding you could be the study of a lifetime." He looks out at the sun setting on the ocean far below, before looking back at Q. "But it would be a terribly dangerous study to undertake. You are capable of feeling anger, jealousy, and hurt, and of acting on those emotions. You refused to leave Vash be when she told you she wanted nothing more to do with you; in fact you tortured her on Deep Space Nine to try to get her to return to you. For all I know, you're capable of wiping Earth out of existence because I made you angry."

"And how is any of that a good argument for rejecting me?" Q asks. "I'm not going to try to tell you I'm a tame lion, because I certainly am not. But if I was going to do something terrible to you because of something you said or did that hurt my poor wittle feewings… you spent years telling me to get off your ship, refusing any gifts I tried to give you unless I forced them on you, insulting me to my face, actually giving me _orders_ and moreover having the temerity to believe I might actually obey them, and outright rejecting my company over and over. If I was going to do something terrible to you, Picard, wouldn't I have done it already?"

"You did," Picard says stiffly. "The Borg."

"That." Q shakes his head. "Yeah… that was pretty bad. I'm… you may have noticed I never did anything like that again."

"You did threaten to kill me for trying to keep Vash from marrying a figment of your imagination."

"What, and you took me seriously? I'm pretty sure that if you'd actually thought you were about to die you might not have spent the last minutes of your life bickering with her."

"And you threatened to destroy the entire Alpha Quadrant if I couldn't pass your test."

"In fact, I wouldn't have destroyed the Alpha Quadrant. I would have only destroyed humanity, and I would have done it because the Continuum was making me do it, and in retrospect I'm not completely convinced I would have gone through with it at all, but if I'd actively planned at the time to tell the Continuum to go jump off a cliff they'd have known about it, and for _some_ reason, ever since they took away my powers I hadn't been feeling much like rebelling against my orders, not openly anyway." Q shrugs. "Anyway, humanity got declared sentient as the result of that test. So there won't be any more tests from the Continuum. And at this point I'm—" _not talking to them ever again._ "—not really worried about their opinion."

"That may be as it may be, but you're not trustworthy. And it may be that I'd prefer to take my chances with what humanity has become. Perhaps there's some role in Starfleet or the Federation for a man out of time, after all."

"I really doubt it. I mean, Scotty was kind of useless when you found him, and he was only eighty years out of date. You've been gone for three hundred. Do you really think Starfleet would have given a commission to, say, Zephram Cochrane?"

"This is too convenient," Picard says. "Oh, I've been floating in a transporter beam for three hundred years. No, of course you can't return me to my own time, because that would violate the timeline. Why, yes, that does mean that I am a displaced person, a man without a home, and the only person left alive who hasn't changed beyond my recognition… is you. Oh, of course all of this is a great coincidence and couldn't possibly have been faked or arranged by you for your benefit. The fact that this sets me up so that the most logical thing to do with my life is exactly what you want me to do doesn't in any way imply that you are lying to me or that you set me up, oh no."

Q can't help the small, twisted smile of embarrassed recognition. He wonders if it would be better to tell Picard the truth. But that would involve telling him about – and he shuts down again because he doesn't want to remember that. "How little you think of me, Jean-Luc. I think I'm hurt."

"How do I know any of this is true? For all I know you just removed me from the transporter beam and took me to one of your manufactured realities, and my crew is frantically looking for me right now."

"I suppose you don't know. I could be lying to you right now." The accusation stings, when it shouldn't. Picard does have some reason to think Q might not be truthful, since, in fact, Q _is_ lying to him, just not about what Picard thinks the lie is about. "But it's not as if you're going anywhere, now is it?"

"Are you going to hold me hostage until I agree to your demands, again?" Picard snaps.

"Picard. I saved your life. I brought you here – which is a real planet, by the way, it just isn't anywhere near Federation space and it doesn't have sentient inhabitants – to give you time to adjust to being among the living again. And I don't appreciate you accusing me of pretending that you were dead, of pretending that three hundred years has passed, lying about all that when in fact we're conveniently in the time you know and nothing bad has happened to you? No. You're dead, Picard."

"This isn't the first time you've told me that."

"It was true the last time, too, but since it hadn't been 300 years since you died, I was able to hold you together through your momentary period of brain death until Crusher was able to get your heart started again. I can't do that now. If I send you back to your own time, three hundred years of history will be wiped out. And frankly, I don't care. They haven't been a great three hundred years, in my opinion." The keening blackness presses up against the walls Q holds it back with, demanding his attention. He shoves it away again. "But _you_ consider it a moral imperative not to alter the timeline… maybe you'd do it if something horrible had happened, the Borg conquest of Earth or the Vulcans being wiped out or something like that, but nothing like that has happened. Your Federation is alive and healthy, humans are still meddling in the affairs of other races, there's even still a Starfleet. You have no good reason to want to alter history except that you want to go back to the people you left behind. Well, sorry, Picard, but you died. They mourned you, they got over you, they went on with their lives, and in the fullness of time, they died too. Sending you back, undoing your death, would wipe out three hundred years of history. You want to do that? You want the only truly selfish act you ever commit to be one of _that_ magnitude?"

"No, I don't," Picard says sharply. "_If_ it's true that I died three hundred years ago, and _if_ it's true that in the past three hundred years my people have continued to live and thrive and our history has gone on, then no, I don't want to wipe any of that out. But I have only your word for it that any of this has happened!"

"Fine. Check." Q gestures, and there's a terminal connected to Federation records sitting in the living. "Go back in the living room and look up whatever you want."

"And what prevents you from faking the records?"

"What prevented me from faking your entire life after you died on the table when your heart was damaged, and actually, everything that's happened to you since has been a play I invented for you out of pity?"

"You don't have that much pity in you."

"Very true. And I don't have that much patience, either. If I wanted you to come with me badly enough to invent an entire fictional future for you to inhabit, I _could_ just have told you 'come with me or I'll blow up your starship.' Since I didn't do that, what makes you think I want you with me badly enough to invent a whole universe for your sake? I'm bored, Picard, but I'm not desperate." This is a lie. He is that desperate. But he doesn't want Picard to know that, because then he might have to explain why, and he never wants to remember—

"Very well. I'll check. And I intend to be thorough, Q."

Maybe this is a mistake. But if this is what it takes to convince Picard that he's been dead for three hundred years, Q has to take the risk.

* * *

Over the next four days, Picard explores the mountain that Q has snuggled this little bungalow into, and the island that consists mostly of the mountain itself and a small strip of beach at its foot, when he's not doing research.

He peppers Q with questions about the modern day, to orient himself so he knows what to research, and Q answers him. Q tells him about how the Federation finally defeated the Borg – how the Borg were, essentially, assimilated _by_ the Federation, various pockets of individualized resistance coming together to take the Collective over after the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant powers united to deal the Borg a crippling blow, and now, the Borg consist of two groups, the Network and the Unity, one individualized and one collective but both assimilating new members only by invitation. Picard has a hard time accepting the notion that anyone would choose assimilation, but Q points out that in the meantime the Federation had become more Borglike themselves, getting over their resistance to cybernetic implants and enhancing their minds and memories with technology. Q explains the circumstances that led to the Cardassians joining the Federation, and what has happened since the Vulcan/Romulan reunification, and why the Andorians are close to extinction now. He talks about the Starfleet mission to the Andromeda galaxy, with the aid of the Kelvans, who no longer think that turning people into styrofoam dodecahedrons is a good idea at all. On a personal level, he tells Picard how one of the other French vintners bought up the Picard winemaking operation after there were no Picards left, and continued to keep the Picard name on the bottle, so the wines his family used to make are still made even though no descendants of the original Picard vintners exist any longer.

He tells Picard nothing about the Continuum, and Picard doesn't ask.

Picard researches the lives and deaths of the people he'd known. He discovers that B4 had eventually grown up into a person much like, though not identical to, Data, and had joined Starfleet, and had only died twenty years ago while attempting to evacuate a colony world facing a sun going nova. H reads about Riker and Troi's four children and their various careers, and points out to Q, who really doesn't care, that in fact there is still a Daughter of the Fifth House of Betazed, who uses technological implants to give herself artificial telepathy because in fact she's three quarters human, one quarter Klingon, and not at all recognizably Betazoid anymore. Troi's children had all been much more human than Betazoid, apparently, much to Lwaxana's chagrin. He sees that Crusher became a director of Starfleet Medical, remarried, and eventually died of great old age, and that Wesley disappeared repeatedly over the course of his life to go on missions for the Travelers but finally returned to Earth to die when he was an old man. He learns that LaForge became a professor of engineering at Starfleet Academy, and Worf was the right hand man to the Klingon Emperor for years before being assassinated. He checks up on the fate of everyone else he cared about. And he seems to be coming around, talking of his friends in the past tense, asking Q questions about what's out there in the universe that suggest that maybe he's seriously thinking about Q's offer.

But then he reads his death certificate.

Q senses the spike of emotion, and turns his attention to read over Picard's shoulder, though from Picard's perspective he's still in the kitchen eating grapes he really doesn't need but likes the taste of. He sees Picard reading over the details of his own death, pulling up the holos of the body, and he leaves the room, teleporting back onto the porch. It doesn't change anything because he can still read over Picard's shoulder, and he's compelled to do it, viewing all the same damning information Picard is seeing, but he doesn't want Picard to be able to look at _him_.

But eventually Picard comes out to the porch to confront him. And if Q dematerializes or flees to the other side of the island, Picard will rightly think him a coward. So Q simply sits in the chair, pretending to look out at the waves, not turning toward Picard.

"You lied to me," Picard says quietly.

_Straight to the point._ "About what?" Q asks, toneless.

"You said I had a transporter accident, that I was bouncing around in a pocket wormhole for years, and you just happened to notice me and pull me out because you were bored." Picard approaches the chair. "I checked my own death records. Apparently as soon as the landing party materialized, we were all blown to bits by a classic explosive, the kind that shreds flesh to bits rather than the kind that vaporizes the bodies. Beverly had to do the forensic autopsy so they could track down where on the planet the materials had come from, and find who planted the bomb." He puts a hand on the arm of Q's chair and looks down on him. "I wasn't merely _thought_ dead or _declared_ dead, Q. I _was_ dead. I've seen the holos. I was torn to pieces instantly in the explosion."

"So? What's your point?"

"My _point?_" Picard is working himself up into a cold rage. "You couldn't be bothered to resurrect me then. Why now? Why lie about it? And what _am_ I? Given that I was quite, quite dead… am I even Jean-Luc Picard? Or am I some sort of unholy simulacrum you created to pass the time with?"

"If you were a simulacrum you'd have already agreed to explore the universe with me." Q turns to face Picard and looks up at him. "I lied to you because I _knew_ you'd react like this. Because you can accept being torn into your component molecules and turned into energy and reassembled off the pattern carried in the wave, and you even know that the beam can be split and re-assemble into more than one copy, but _I_ could only be making some sort of simulation of you, not the real thing. Even though your _own technology_ can make two of you out of a transporter beam, but I can't do the same thing, although my technology is, oh, billions of years more advanced than yours. No, I have to create some sort of soulless fake, because of course Q doesn't understand the human mind well enough to create a real person… even though your damn replicators don't understand a damn thing and they can still make you a perfect chocolate cake. Even though your transporters understand nothing and they can still reassemble a blob of amorphous energy into you. _I_ can't possibly be able to go back 300 years ago, and analyze the pattern that was you, when your transporter disassembled you, and come back and recreate it as precisely as the transporter recreated you on top of the bomb that killed you. Even though you know I can do anything. And you were never really worried about whether Thomas Riker had a soul or not, you were fully willing to accept _him_ as a real person and an identical copy of your Number One, but no, you've got to angst over whether _you_, a copy made by a _much_ more sophisticated and technologically advanced entity than your goddamn _transporter_, could possibly have a _soul_. Even though you don't even believe in souls."

"You never even tried. You assumed I would believe the worst of you."

"Because you always do! If I'd told you from the beginning, yes, Jean-Luc, you landed on a bomb and it ripped you to shreds, but don't worry, I made a copy of you from the transporter signal and brought it to the present with me, which is your future, and that's why the last thing you remember is beaming down to the planet… you'd have spent the last several days angsting over whether or not you were real, and can you trust your own feelings, and could I have reprogrammed you to do what I want you to do, and so on ad nauseam."

"And what stops me from angsting over these things now? How _do_ I know you didn't reprogram me?"

"Because I didn't do it three hundred years ago, so why would I do it now? If I'd wanted to create my very own slave-Picard to be my pet and fawn on me worshipfully, I could have done that at any time. Feel like being my harem boy, Picard? Gonna go back in the kitchen and get me some grapes?"

"No, of course not!"

"Then why do you think I've taken your free will? Trust me, if I had, we wouldn't be having this argument!"

Picard steps back. "If you can ask if you have a soul," he says softly, "the answer to the question must be yes."

"Chronicles of Narnia, isn't that?"

"Yes. One of the Talking Animals asked Aslan if he had a soul. I suppose… if I can ask the question as to whether or not you have left me free will… you must have."

"Good. Great. So you're not going to go whining about how you're a soulless undead thing or something? Because you're not." Q stands up and paces. "You're the _exact_ same Picard that dissolved in that transporter beam as the one who got himself blown to bits when he materialized. I went out of my way to take the pattern from that point." He sighs. "Maybe I should have given you the benefit of the doubt and told you the truth, but I was afraid you'd whine at me that if you're really dead I should have left you dead and 'humans are meant to die, Q, you didn't have the right to interfere with my natural fate' and blah blah blah. Are you going to do any of that? Because if you are, let me know and I'll just make a puppet _me_ you can blather to until you're done, and I'll go, I don't know, blow up a few stars or something. Uninhabited ones, just so you feel better about it."

"I'm not going to tell you you should have left me dead. Obviously you know me well enough to know I disapprove of your meddling, and I'm not wholly convinced I'm better off alive in a century I no longer fit into than I was dead… but I've always thought that where there's life, there's hope, and I've never shrunk away from a challenge. Besides, I imagine that if I wanted to be dead badly enough, I could push you into obliging me."

"You could maybe push me into looking the other way as you jump off the cliff, if you whine enough about it. But I'm not going to kill you. Not even if you beg me to. I went to too much effort to bring you back to kill you."

"And that's the missing piece of this puzzle." Picard walks behind Q's chair, putting it between himself and Q. "When you claimed that I was bouncing around in a pocket universe, it made a certain amount of sense that you wouldn't notice until you had nothing better to do, and then on a whim you might rescue me. That fit my understanding of you. But it makes no sense at all that you would resurrect me three hundred years after my death, unless you planned it that way so that I would have no alternative but to go with you. You could have brought me back then and there – I'm sure you noticed my death when it happened."

Q opens his hands and separates them in a gesture almost like a shrug. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."

"So why now? Why bring me back three hundred years after my death? Were you planning this all along? You thought to bring me back after I died, but then you thought, 'wait, if I wait until all of Picard's friends and family are dead to bring him back, he'll have no choice but to turn to me?'"

"You're not that important. I didn't bring you back then because I had better things to do. Yeah, okay, I wasn't very happy that you were dead, but you were mortal, and mortals die. I had things to do. I didn't need you. And you wouldn't have appreciated it if I had brought you back. So I didn't bother."

"Then why now? What changed?"

"I told you. Bored now."

"Mm-hmm. You lived without me for millions, perhaps billions of years. But now you can't imagine anything entertaining to do without _me_. Instead of going and bothering one of the many, many mortals who are alive today, you had to resurrect me."

This is dangerously close to the truth. The pain comes back, and this time Q almost lets it show. Not because he can't control this human body he wears – he's a Q. He's nigh-omnipotent. Of course he can make this human body do anything he wants it to do, including showing none of the black grief that threatens to swamp him. But his own mind almost betrays him. Some part of him actually _wants_ to show Picard what he's really feeling. And that's dangerous, and ridiculous, because he has millions of years in training in never showing anyone what he really feels because they'll just mock him with it or use it to hurt him or use it to destroy him, invade his mind, make him remember things that never happened and feel things he never felt and _no_ he will not think about that!

"You remember when I told you that in the entire universe, you were the closest thing I had to a friend, Jean-Luc?"

"Of course I do."

"It's still true."

"That's even sadder now than it was then. In three hundred years, you haven't met a single other person you feel something for?"

"I've been busy."

"Yes, you've mentioned that. Busy doing what?"

And that's exactly what he doesn't want to think about. "I was in the Continuum," he says dismissively. "Not much opportunity to meet new mortals."

"Oh. Oh, of course." Picard suddenly smiles. "I remember now. Admiral Janeway reported that you'd had a child. So is this empty nest syndrome, Q? Your son's grown up now and you need something else to occupy your time?"

Q opens his mouth to lie and say yes. If he lies and says yes, Picard will have a plausible explanation and won't dig any deeper. He won't ask any more questions and Q won't have to think about the truth.

Except that the direct mention of his son has broken through the wall of denial in Q's mind, and the screaming blackness is sweeping over him, and his own self betrays him. He is paralyzed, unable to make the human mouth move, unable to make the lying words, unable even to muster up his powers to turn the body into a puppet and do it that way. He stands, frozen, mouth open, trying to force something, anything, to come out, but the anguish he's pushed away for so long has him full in its grip and he can't move, can't speak, can't do anything.

"Q?" Picard asks, and then nearly runs to him, around the chair and across the patio to stand in front of Q. "Q, what's wrong? Is something wrong? What's happened?"

The concern in Picard's voice undoes him. It's what he wished for years he might hear from Picard, and laughed at himself for wanting because no Q needs concern from _mortals_, no Q needs affection, no Q needs someone to care about him and certainly not a mortal, and now he hears it and it's what he always wanted and he would throw it away in a minute, in a picosecond, to only have the reasons for it be no longer true, and he breaks. He smiles a bright cheery smile as if he's going to lie, and it twists on his face as he tells the truth. "Actually, he's dead," Q says, his tone a bright and sunny parody of itself.

Picard looks stunned. "_Dead?_ Oh my God. I'm so sorry. How…?"

"He—" The human throat is closing, the human eyes are welling with tears. The Q mind is drowning under the weight of black grief and guilt. "I— He—"

He can't, he can't say it, he can't remember it but he can't stop the memories, his little boy looking up at him with accusation and pain in his face as he crumbles, unraveling back into the Continuum, and Q desperately tries to gather the pieces back together and force them back together, reknit the unraveling pattern, stop the child's uncreation, but there's nothing he can do and in moments nothing left in his hands but a faint trickle of energies where there used to be his living sentient baby, and he screams. He can crumple the sun into a black hole, tear space and time into shreds in his hands. Or he can fill the air with a billion voices keening in grief and horror. Or he can channel the pain through the human body rather than the Q powers, let himself express his pain the human way, and as humiliating as that might be it seems safer and saner than letting his grief and his powers mix. Q crumples to the floor, kneeling doubled over, and howls.

Distantly he is aware of Picard kneeling beside him, one arm around his back. "It's all right," Picard says softly. "It's all right, Q."

This seems absurd and he rejects it. He looks up at Picard, seeing him with powers rather than his human eyes because his human eyes are completely blinded by tears. "It's not all right," he chokes out. "He's dead. It'll never be all right again."

Picard lets go of him, simply kneeling next to him on the floor, looking at him. "I don't mean that your son's death is all right. Of course not. I mean that it's all right to grieve. You can weep for him if you wish. No one will mock you or think less of you or try to embarrass you with it."

Oh, that's funny, that Picard actually knows him that well to say that. And he's telling the truth, Q knows, because the Continuum cannot see Q here and Picard himself might enjoy the mocking banter that usually characterizes their relationship, but he won't kick an entity when he's down. He's always known that if Picard would ever see him as enough of a person to understand that he can feel pain, Picard could feel compassion for him. The thing about being a god, of course, is that you're usually invulnerable, which means mortals don't think they need to feel compassion for you. It takes something like this, something like the death of a child, and he remembers his son's disintegration again and loses his train of thought. Hysterical sobs wrack the human form he wears and he can't distance himself, can't try to separate himself from it, because the human form is only expressing what the Q mind feels and if he tries to pull himself out of the human body the grief will just follow him.

"I tried," he says. "I tried to save him."

"I understand."

"No you don't. Because it's a lie. I didn't try. Didn't try hard enough. Because the one thing he needed, the one thing he needed me to do, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't keep opening myself up to _her_, I couldn't let her in anymore, and he wasn't done, he wasn't ready, we needed to keep working together and I couldn't, I couldn't… so he fell apart. He fell apart in my hands. And he knew, he knew it was my fault. He knew."

This time Picard doesn't say anything. He just sits there, looking at Q with an expression of concern and sorrow on his face. Q never expected to be in this position; back in the old days, once or twice he considered showing up to try to comfort Picard after a tragedy, the death of Picard's brother and nephew for instance… but he couldn't do it, because he didn't know how, and he didn't want to make matters worse. At the time he never imagined that someday _he_ would be the one who needed comfort. But now Picard is here, doing very little, probably profoundly uncomfortable with the situation, but here and trying to help, which is more than Q ever did for him and he feels guilty about that, too, though not nearly as guilty as he does for the child's death.

After a while he has himself under enough control to talk, although his words are still punctuated by occasional sobs. "Do you remember the war in the Continuum? The one Janeway told you about?"

"Yes. The one that was destroying stars in our dimension?"

"Funny about that. When you were alive those stars were in the Delta Quadrant and you couldn't get there, couldn't see the light for another 70,000 years, you people had no way of knowing. Janeway didn't know. They lied to her, they lied to her sensors. But they didn't keep it up. When you, you humans, not you personally, you were dead, but when your Starfleet went to the Delta Quadrant finally those stars were all still there. Just fine. Didn't go anywhere. Because it _never happened._"

"Did you… did the Continuum somehow undo the war? Reverse time?"

"We can't do that to ourselves, Picard. It was much, much simpler than that." He crumples up for another few moments, remembering. "She wasn't really my companion for billions of years. I didn't love her. Not really. But we'd been together a few hundred years ago. I was arguing with the Continuum, insisting that if we didn't all have greater freedoms, if there was no change, we'd all want to die. Like Q did. He told me before he killed himself, he told me to shake up the Continuum, try to make things change. So I tried. And they couldn't shut me up, and I was gathering support. So they stopped me."

Picard says nothing, waits for Q to get enough control of himself again to go on with his story. Q uses his powers to manifest a handkerchief and wipes his face with it – he could just teleport the tears off his face, or restructure the human body so it's not crying, but he doesn't think he has that level of fine concentration right now.

"She seduced me. Told me she was interested in my ideas, and did I want to get back together for a while. It had been fun, back then, and we ended it mutually, I had no reason to say no. And when I was open to her, when we were joined, she… she…"

"What, Q? What did she do?" Picard asks gently.

Q can't even put into human words what she did to him, then. The closest human concept that approaches the horror of what she did is "rape", but even that doesn't begin to cover it. But he tries. "She… she called in her allies. My enemies. The people who didn't want me to rock the boat. She held me… held my shields open… long enough that they could get there… they could force it, keep me in place, open where they could, could _rewrite_ me… and I couldn't stop them. They planted the fake memories, they made me think there was a war going on. They invented completely imaginary Qs for me to mourn so I'd believe that some of us had been killed. They… they made me fall in love with _her_. So I'd stay open to her, so she could keep, keep _tweaking_ me, every time it looked like I might remember. And then… and then… they gave me a compulsion. They thought a child would distract me. I would be too occupied with raising a kid to raise hell, and I'd have to stay open to her through an entire childhood, and it would fulfill my need for change and variety in my life without affecting the Continuum…"

"They _made_ you want a child?"

"I thought it would end the war. I don't know why. Nothing I thought was rational. My mind had been edited, I was being mind controlled, everything was like one of you mortals' dreams where everything makes perfect sense at the time and then you wake up and look back and go 'but why _would_ putting butter on Data's cat stop the Borg?' But part of me knew what she'd done. I didn't, I didn't really know, I wasn't conscious of anything, but instinctively I wanted to stay away from her. I went to Janeway to have the baby. And Q showed up to intimidate Janeway into staying away from me.

"And then they, the Continuum, they set up this whole thing, this whole little play where they showed Janeway what they were showing me, and her belief could reinforce mine, because I was fallen so far I was checking my perceptions against _mortals_', and they pretended to try to kill me. And _she_, she brought the entire _Voyager_ in, made them all see the same show, and pretended to rescue me, and I believed it. I thought she saved me. I thought I loved her, and she loved me. So when Janeway suggested I have the kid with _Q_, of course she went for it, it was what she and her cohorts had been angling for all along.

"We don't have children like you do. There's no, no, sperm and egg and hey you're done. It's a collaboration. You open your mind to the other parent, totally, you become almost one person and you weave the child together out of your own combined mind. And they become a person, they become sentient, they can think for themselves and have feelings long before they can be cut off from the feed from their parents. Like what if you could have a conversation with your mother about feeding the ducks or why is the sky blue while you're still attached to her umbilical cord. Except the umbilicals go to your father and your mother and they're connected to each other as well and if any of the links break, any of the circuits cut, the energy stops flowing and the child dissolves, if they're not ready to be separated they dissolve, they can't maintain their integrity anymore, and he… and he…"

"Is that what happened to your son?"

"I found out." He laughs, bitterly, brokenly. "The child was to keep me open to her so she could keep editing me. But it kept her open to me too. And you can't keep a secret in the Continuum forever. It took me three hundred years but I found out. They lied to me, they edited my mind, they controlled me. They made me think I loved her so she could keep me under control. I found out."

Another sob escapes him. "My baby… he wasn't old enough. He couldn't be cut off. But I _couldn't_ keep my mind open to her. I tried, but I hated her… I hated her so much, I hated the entire Continuum for what they did but especially her, and my hate… my hate…" He breaks down completely again, for several minutes unable to do anything but sob.

"Because you came to hate your lover, for enslaving your mind… your son died?"

"Yes. Yes. Exactly. I couldn't… I would have done anything to keep him alive, Picard, anything, anything except the one thing he needed me to do because I _couldn't_, it was like handing yourself over to be raped, or like the Borg, could you have deliberately given yourself to the Borg to save another person?" Too late he remembers that Picard once tried exactly that to save Data, and cries harder, because if he'd been a better person, a person more like Picard, a more selfless person, he might have been able to endure the intrusion into his mind after he learned the truth, he might have been able to forgive the person he had been brainwashed into loving who had betrayed him so horribly, and then maybe his son would be alive. His child is dead because Q was selfish, because he couldn't bear _her_ touch in his mind anymore when he knew what she'd done, and his shields had come up and he'd closed himself to her even though he knew the child needed him to stay open and he _couldn't_ open them again, the horror and nausea surging through him at how his mind had been violated and he'd tried so hard to hold the child together anyway and he had failed, so terribly…

"Q… I am so sorry."

"Don't pity me, Picard!" He looks up at Picard's face, almost snarling. "Tell me what a horrible person I am. Tell me I should have sacrificed more, I should have tried harder. I should have forgiven her for what she did. I should have opened myself up and let her do it again, because that would have kept our baby alive. Tell me what a selfish monster I am, tell me you'd have done better in my place. Tell me!"

"No." Picard shakes his head, and puts a hand on Q's trembling shoulder. "No, I… I can't judge you. Human biology doesn't work that way. I can never be in a position where I must choose between the rape of my mind at the hands of someone I trusted, and the life of a child. I cannot experience what you experienced, so I cannot judge you. I have no way of knowing what I would have done in your place. But I don't think you should blame yourself. You were assaulted… I gather from some of what you've said that your people consider such telepathic brainwashing to be an even more horrific crime than we humans do, perhaps because you all have the power to commit it. You were reeling from betrayal, from the knowledge that your mind and memories weren't your own. And you reacted in an entirely natural way, shutting yourself away from your tormentor, trying to protect yourself. If I understand you correctly, it was a side effect of your self protection that your child died… not what you intended, perhaps not even what you expected, and by the time you understood what was happening, it was too late, wasn't it?"

Q nods. Funny how Picard can extract all that from the things Q has said. "I didn't… I didn't even think of the effect it would have on him. We hardly ever have children; I barely remember the last one. Amanda was able to cut free of her parents while she was still an infant. I didn't remember how long it takes when they aren't anchored in a mortal body, when they're pure Q and raised in the Continuum the whole time. I took him from her, I left, I was going to confront the Continuum… and then he started to disintegrate. And I couldn't open myself up to the link to her again." He looks down at the floor. "It happened so fast, Jean-Luc… but I'm a Q, I'm supposed to be able to think fast. I should have been able to react faster, I should have realized… _something._ There must have been something I could have done."

"Perhaps there was. But if you had the power to go back and do it over, I'm sure you'd have done so by now, so… it doesn't appear that tormenting yourself with what you could have done better is any more effective for the Q than it is for humans."

"He was my _child_. I was supposed to _protect_ him."

"I know. I know." Even though he doesn't, because _he_ never had a child, and Q is going to point that out to him, but he's so tired from the outpouring of emotion and it feels good to simply stay there, kneeling on the floor, with Picard's hand squeezing his shoulder. "Is that you wanted me here? You thought I would accuse you of killing your own son? Did you want me to serve as your conscience, somehow?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. I didn't want to tell you about any of this, but… I had to. I couldn't stop myself."

"You wanted someone to talk to."

Q has himself enough under control that he can sit up, stop sobbing, wipe the tears away again and this time have them stay away. "I did. Not just about this. I… I'm never going back to the Continuum, Jean-Luc. I can't. All of them… even the ones who didn't actively participate in holding me down and ripping my mind open and brainwashing me, they let it stand. They didn't defend me, they didn't say anything to me, they didn't even drop hints. I hate them all. I'm never going back."

"Can you actually do that?"

"Oh, eventually it'll kill me if I never return." Q shrugs. "If I never return to the Continuum I'll live another ten thousand years at most before I run out of energy or accumulate too much damage. But I don't really care, I mean, at this point I don't even really _want_ eternity. It's been hell living through the last five years." He shakes his head. "I tried to find something else to do, you know. After I left the Continuum, I wandered around looking for something to occupy my attention, but… all the mortals I was working with three hundred years ago are dead, or they've changed too much to be interesting anymore. And I couldn't get interested in any new projects." His throat tightens again, but this time, he's in enough control of his powers to suppress it. "You know… what's the point to discovering something mildly interesting if I can't go home and share it with the Continuum? I can explore all I want, but at the end of the day it means nothing if I've got no one to talk to, and it was hard to find things to interest me _before_ this happened. Everything…"

He closes his eyes. "I can't stand to look at mortal children, and they're everywhere. Can't get away from them if you're going to watch mortals. I see mortals who are friends, teammates, shipmates, comrades, whatever… people who work together… and I hate them, because _their_ friends and family didn't betray them and brainwash them and use a baby to keep control of them. The idea of raining death and destruction down on innocent people is getting to be more and more appealing. Why should they be happy when my life's been ruined and my son is dead? But, you know, I never wanted to be a creature like Armus. I always thought I had more sophistication than that, that when I tormented mortals it should have a point to it. There's no point to anything anymore. It's all empty. And I can't even kill myself without crawling back to the Continuum to beg for permission to die, and the stars will burn out and the galactic core will fall in on itself before I give them the satisfaction."

"So why me?"

"Because I want something else to _do._" Q stands up, looking at Picard the whole time. "Someone to talk to. Not about this whole sordid business, necessarily, but _anything._ If I can't explore strange new worlds because there aren't any, I can take you there and let _you_ see something you've never seen before, get some vicarious enjoyment out of your experience. I told Vash, when I saw the universe through her eyes it looked new again. Even more so for you. You actually _are_ an explorer; you don't look at new experiences with an eye to what you can get out of them, you just enjoy them for what they are. That's what I need, Jean-Luc. I need someone who isn't a Q I can talk to. Someone I can show things to."

Picard nods, slowly. "I… think I understand. But why me? If you were willing to resurrect a dead man, surely in all the time you've existed there have been other mortals, and obviously the fact that they are dead now wouldn't be a barrier to you any more than my death was, so why me?"

"Fishing for compliments, _mon ami?_" His smile is a ghost of itself.

"I simply want to understand."

"Well, understand how unusual you are then." Q paces a bit. "Before I met you, Picard, I had only three kinds of relationships with mortals. Some thought of me as a god, some thought of me as a demon, and some thought I was a mortal like them. No one who knew what I was, who knew the power I wield, could look at me as if I were a person, like them. No one, until you."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. Well, no. There was Guinan. But she hates me almost as much as I hate the Continuum. So I guess you were the second, technically."

"But since you met me, there _were_ others. Captain Janeway, among others."

"Yeah, you know… none of what happened was Janeway's fault. I know this. But I can't..." He closes his eyes again. "If she were still alive I wouldn't go to her. Because I couldn't look at her without remembering the lies the Continuum forced on both of us. And she'd remind me of my son." He looks at Picard. "Sorry, Jeannot. It's you. In all the universe, in all of time and space… you're the only mortal who knows what I am and treats me like an equal anyway, whose presence I can tolerate and vice versa." He smiles sadly. "You remember when I made you tell me you needed me? Well, you may not be holding the Borg to my head, but I'll say it anyway. I need you, Jean-Luc."

"And what if I were to say no? That I would prefer to go to Earth and do what I can to build a new life in this new world? Would you try to force me?"

Q scowls. "Picard, if after I have ripped my guts out to lay them at your feet and painted this entire patio with the aortal blood from my still-beating heart, you still can say 'no' to me, then I don't _want_ you, and you can go to Earth, or to hell, or wherever."

"I haven't said no. But I want to know that you will allow me to say no. I'm not going to tolerate being your pet, Q. If you've chosen me because I'm the only mortal who treats you as an equal, then you treat _me_ as an equal, or you send me to Earth and let me make my own way. No game playing, no 'we'll do it my way because I'm the Q and you're the lowly human', no pretending you're doing _me_ a huge favor when you've just admitted this is about what you need."

"Well, I did bring you back to life. That's a pretty huge favor, you gotta admit."

"But I didn't need you to do that. I was quite peacefully dead for three hundred years and I imagine I could have remained so eternally without it bothering me," Picard says sardonically. "You, on the other hand, have just admitted that you can't bear your existence as it is, and you've resurrected me as your only hope of escaping your own loneliness and the weight of your emotions. And… yes. What you offer is tempting. I'm willing to help you; what you want of me…" he smiles softly. "Well, actually, I do have to admit it sounds very appealing. I'd love to explore the galaxy, to see things no human has seen. But not as your lapdog."

"What about my cat?" Q asks. "Will you be my cat? Rub up against me when you're hungry, stalk off when I want to pet you and you're not interested, pee all over my furniture because you're mad that I took you off Vega Sigma before you were done looking at the artwork?"

Picard almost laughs. He seems to catch himself just in time. "Not your cat, either. I'll consider being your friend, though, if you're willing to behave like a friend would. It sounds like you could use one."

"Just as well. Hairless cats look even stupider than hairless monkeys."

"So, do we have an agreement? You will behave toward me as if you have some respect for my autonomy and intelligence – regardless of your actual opinion of said intelligence?"

"I'll try. I can't promise I'll do it perfectly – you know, I've been dealing with mortals for millions of years, and like I said, you're only the second one ever who knows what I am and doesn't worship or demonize me for it. It's not very easy to adjust to that, even though it's what I want."

"Well, try all you like, but if you consistently fail to succeed I will insist you end our relationship and return me to Earth."

"Fair enough." He holds out his hand. After a moment, Picard reaches out and shakes it.

"So," Q says to him. "Where in the universe do you want to go?"

"Just this one time," Picard says, "surprise me."

"Oh, I think I can do that."


	14. Fourteen: Qube Root

_Author's Note: This segment is based on the pro novel by Peter David, "Q-Squared". It bears very little resemblance to current canon regarding Q reproduction, because at the time Peter David wrote the book, none of the Voyager episodes dealing with reproduction in the Continuum had aired. If you have not read the book, this segment won't make much sense, and it also contains spoilers for the book. Which I heartily recommend you read if you like Q, and if you don't like Q, I don't get why you're reading this fanfic. So if you want to skip this segment, go to the library, get "Q-Squared" and read it first, go right ahead. I'll wait. :-)_

* * *

Q sits on the dead, empty world, staring into nothing. He senses one of his two oldest friends appear behind him, but he makes no attempt to shift his focus in that direction or acknowledge the other's appearance in any way.

"When were you going to tell me?" Trelane's other father says.

Q considers, and discards, several answers, among them _Never_ and _When I was sure you wouldn't promptly rat him out to the Continuum because you disapprove of breaking rules._ What he says, finally, is, "I can't believe you didn't know. I mean, it's not as if the parts of his pattern that were mine were exactly _hidden_. A _human_ guessed the truth because of the similarity between him and me." Or the part of the truth a human could understand, anyway. "Did you ever even look at the kid?"

"Forgive me for assuming that my two best friends would not have gone behind my back to add the pattern of an unauthorized parent to my child without my knowledge or approval."

He has a point. "It was Q's decision not to tell you," Q says. "And she spends more time with you than I do anymore, ever since you two had the kid, so… I figured she knew what she was talking about."

"I see," the other Q says. "I had wondered if you even realize how much his death is your fault. From your defensive tone, it seems you don't."

"I know I killed him. It's hard to get to be more my fault than that," Q snaps. "But what else could I have done? The _multiverse_ would have been destroyed! I wanted to protect him, to separate him from the mad one and return him to sanity, and he ripped me to pieces for my trouble and threw me in a temporal pit it took me six billion years to escape from. You tell me, Q. What else could I have done?"

"I'm not talking about that. Of course you had to kill him. By that point, any of us would have done the same, if we'd been free to do it. In _that_, and that alone, you did the right thing."

"Well, then, what? Yes, I took my eye off him for a few minutes, and while I was cooling off from the latest stupid stunt he'd pulled, his mad cognate ate him. But first of all, how could I possibly have expected such a thing to happen? And secondly, _your_ cognate was right there when his cognate built the device and went mad with it. I was there as an amnesiac fraction of myself; you had your full intellect, your full power, and you still let him plunge himself into the Heart of the Storm."

"I'm not talking about that, either. Though I think it is disingenuous of you to claim that _I_ share as much blame as you because of something my _cognate_ did. When _my_ Trelane talked about the Heart of the Storm, _I_ explained the danger to him, and he never built such a device. It wasn't your cognate that let my Trelane be devoured by his mad cognate; it was _you_, personally."

"Yes. And I paid for it."

"Yes. You did." Trelane's father draws next to Q, but does not touch him. His mindvoice is very cold, very controlled, few emotions leaking through his shields. "That isn't what I blame you for anyway."

Q shifts his attention to look at his best friend – or possibly, former best friend – hard. "Then what?"

"You poisoned him, from the moment of his creation, with your pattern." The other Q's mindvoice is soft, cold, relentless. "You were an unauthorized parent. You had no right to reproduce, and the Continuum as a whole thought your pattern in a child would be a danger, to the child or to the Continuum, but you just didn't care because you always know best. You added your own parentage to a child who should have been only mine and Q's. And the worst of it is, even if you had been authorized to reproduce I would never have chosen to have a child with you. You were my best friend, but _I_ could see the danger in adding your pattern to mine. Create a child with my intellect, my curiosity, my desire to push the boundaries of knowledge… and your rebelliousness, your cavalier disregard for rules that stand between you and your desires? How could any Q not see what a terrible combination that would be?"

Q says nothing, because the truth is, he'd never considered the issue when Q had asked him to contribute himself to Trelane's pattern. He'd been flattered, and excited, and he'd felt that he was putting one over on the Continuum. The consequences of getting caught did haunt him throughout Trelane's life, but the consequences of his pattern shaping Trelane's nature never struck him as a potential problem… not until he saw the cognate build his device and plunge into the Heart of the Storm and go mad, anyway.

"Tell me," Trelane's acknowledged father says, "why did you do it? Why did Q ask you, or allow you, to involve yourself?"

"Why don't you ask her?" Q asks bitterly.

"Because she's gone. She left our timeline to try to find some track in the multiverse where Trelane isn't dead."

"And it never occurred to her that if she finds one, he'll already have her own cognate there to be his mother?"

"I'm sure it occurred to her, Q. She just doesn't care. She'll merge herself with her own cognate and disappear forever. Either way, we will never see her again."

So. Trelane is dead, and Trelane's mother is gone, and might as well be dead. Q thinks he should feel grief at this, but can only feel a sense of overwhelming numbness, a despairing resignation. Of course she is gone. Anything that could possibly make this situation worse must be what has happened, or will happen. He may have saved the universe, but the universe isn't done making him pay for what he did to cause the problem in the first place.

When he denied, to Picard, that he was Trelane's father, in a way that would confirm the exact thing he was ostensibly denying, he didn't go into details, didn't explain the difference between Q and human reproduction or attitudes toward sexuality. He didn't need to; he could use shorthand, play on the human's understanding of sex and the human's prejudices, to get across the basic idea of the problem with his being Trelane's father and why he had never admitted it. So he strongly implied that he had cuckolded his friend, as if the Q have a concept of monogamy, which they don't, or can accidentally create a child as the result of a love affair, which they can't, or as if the Q next to him right now _isn't_ Trelane's father, which he is. Picard had no referent for a species that can have any number of parents involved in the creation of the same child. But Picard also had no referent for a society of immortals that would ruthlessly restrict reproduction.

Q's crime was not in loving Trelane's mother. Had Trelane's father, the scientist, returned from his researches to find his two best friends making love to each other, sharing pleasure and intimacy in a joining of minds and patterns, the worst reaction he might have had would have been to be a trifle miffed that they hadn't waited for him to be free to join in. More likely, he would have been pleased that his friends were enjoying themselves in his absence, both because his friends' emotional well-being had been important to him and because that decreased the demands either of them might have put on _him._ In the Continuum, no Q owns another Q; no one expects, or even wants, exclusive relations with a partner in love. And even had monogamy existed in the Continuum, it would have been moot in the case of their relationship, which had been much more like a human threesome than a marriage.

Trelane's mother is – was, Q supposes, now that she is likely gone forever – well-loved by the Continuum, because she is, was, lovable. A goddess of love on a thousand mortal worlds, she was genuinely kind, compassionate and giving to her fellow Q, so much so that even in a species that considers love and intimacy dangerous and somewhat ridiculous, few Q could feel anything but joy in her presence. But her great talent at love came with a significant weakness. She needed more love, more intimacy, than any one Q could ever give her, lest they merge together into a single entity, devouring each other the way Trelane's mad cognate had devoured him.

So her childhood best friend, the bad boy rebel who couldn't quite make himself fully vulnerable to any other Q, and _his_ other best friend, the aloof genius who could never love any Q more than he loved his quest for knowledge, had come up with a plan, uncounted millennia ago. The scientist would share himself fully with her, joining with her as deeply as she needed and sharing as much intimacy as she required… for the time he could give her, but most of his time would still go to his research. And the rebel, the trickster, would give her as much time as they could both stand, and as much love as he was capable of sharing with _any_ Q, but it would never be as deep as she needed because he simply couldn't. Between the two of them, they thought, they could almost fill her needs.

And then she wanted a child.

An immortal species must closely control its own reproduction. The only Q who were permitted to reproduce were those who had traits the Continuum felt it needed or considered valuable. The scientist, of course, was considered a very worthy Q – while the Q have appointed themselves guardians of the Heart of the Storm simply because they live next to it and tap a tiny fraction of its power for their omnipotence, avoiding insanity by sharing the strain out amongst an entire Continuum, that role isn't truly what they think of as their reason for existing. It's the quest for greater knowledge that made the Continuum in the first place, and it's that quest they still see as driving them as a species, even now – or perhaps especially now – that they already know so very much. So of course one of their greatest geniuses and inventors was considered worthy to reproduce. And quite aside from the fact that everyone loved Trelane's mother and didn't want to disappoint her, the truth is that Q like her are needed by the Continuum, the emotional glue that holds a fractious, selfish species together. Love is dangerous to individual Q but vitally necessary to the Continuum as a whole… and because it's dangerous, there is more need for new Q capable of great love than there is for many other archetypes. Also, letting such Q have children helps to keep them sane and happy and alive, continuing to preserve the "continuous" part of the Continuum.

But since Q's own birth, rebels and tricksters and questioners of authority are no longer seen as nearly as valuable, necessary or worth having around as the Continuum thought when his own creation was authorized. So he was not granted the right to reproduce. And if an unauthorized parent should contribute their pattern to a child, that child would be destroyed, no questions asked. An adult with unauthorized parents could be tested for worthiness to be a Q, and destroyed only if they should fail the tests, as Q himself had done for Amanda Rogers, whose parents had certainly been unauthorized but who hadn't been known for sure to be a Q until she was so close to adulthood that Q had successfully been able to argue that she should be treated the way Q who'd survived to adulthood with unauthorized parents were. But if a _child_ were found to have an unauthorized parent, the child would simply be killed.

That didn't stop Q from asking him to contribute to her child, and it didn't stop him from accepting. Perhaps it should have. But Q had reasons for what he did.

"You were never there," he says to his friend, answering the accusatory question with another accusation. "You agreed to have a child with her, yes, very big of you. And then you left her with all the work. You handed her a piece of your pattern and said, here, dear, see what kind of a baby you can knit out of this, and then you ran back to your work."

"Q knew I had work to do. She knew my work would always be my priority."

"Of course she _knew_ it, but that didn't make her any happier about it." Q shrugs. "So, she asked me to help her. And I pointed out that I couldn't violate the pattern of a baby Q by working with its weave unless my pattern was part of it. So she asked me to contribute. Because she wanted _someone_ to work with her on Trelane's creation, and you weren't there."

"And why did you agree? You've always said you had no desire to have children!"

Q shakes his head. "I had no desire to _raise_ children. I'd have begged out on being Trelane's godfather if I'd known a way to say no without offending both of you. But… you may have noticed, most of my loudest declarations of a total lack of desire to procreate came _after_ Trelane was created? Because I could _see_ my pattern in him… admittedly, I knew to look for it, but if I could see it surely any other Q who really looked at him could see it. I never imagined, when I participated in his creation, that so _much_ of me would be expressed in him… so, you know, if everyone in the Continuum thinks I'd rather be a Rigellian slugworm than make a baby, no one's going to think it's anything more than coincidence that my best friends' kid looks just like me. I mean, no one would really have wanted to accuse Q of doing something so disreputable as asking an unauthorized parent to participate in her baby-making anyway, but just in case."

"You should have told me. One of you should have told me."

"I suppose she was afraid that you'd be too much of a stickler for the rules. Tell the Continuum all about Trelane having an unauthorized third parent and try to console her by offering to make a new one with her once they'd dissolved him."

He is abruptly halfway across the planet, his friend's power crushing his pattern into a ball, before Q has time to realize he's being attacked. "How _dare_ you!" the scientist snarls. "Trelane was _my son!_ I would never have – would never—"

Q pushes the other's power away, freeing himself without attacking in retaliation. "You barely seemed to notice the kid was there half the time. _I_ had to take him exploring when Q got sick of dealing with him, long before I was supposed to take him under my wing formally. Half the time you two just stuck him in some nursery and let him play with whatever hapless toys happened to drift into his path. I know why Q did it – with her emotional problems, she _had_ to back off, she couldn't risk smothering the poor thing. But why did you agree to actually have a kid if you weren't willing to raise it? You left Q alone with him more and more of the time. It was looking to _me_ like you were sick of dealing with him and using the fact that you had research as an excuse to avoid your obligations."

"Yes. I was a failure as a father. I acknowledge that. I can't avoid acknowledging that – anyone whose son attempts to destroy the multiverse is a failure as a parent, by definition. But I would never have risked my son's life. You, though…" The other Q's mindspeech is ice cold. "Mentors are supposed to be different from parents _because_ children need the perspective of a Q whose pattern is unrelated. You were too similar to him, and too similar to some of his worst qualities. If I had _known_ you were also his father I could have avoided the mistake of making _you_ his mentor."

"Again. I looked away for a moment, and his mad cognate _ate_ him. You looked away from him for many, many moments; if he hadn't been in my care the same thing would have happened. And the _cognate_ was in _your_ care, or your cognate's care, when he built his device and transported himself to the Heart of the Storm." Q shakes his head, or rather, since he hasn't got a head, does the Q equivalent. "Trelane didn't become corrupted because my mentorship accentuated errors in his pattern. He was devoured by a cognate who had experienced the Heart of the Storm. The _exact_ same thing would have happened if he'd stayed at home with you."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. You took him to a ship full of mortals, with no sensors, no barriers, no way to detect the presence of a cognate. But even that is not your worst sin." The other Q pushes his power against Q, only briefly, forcing Q to focus attention on him. "You had him in your hands. The tiniest fragment of his pattern survived the Heart of the Storm, and you caught him. You could have saved him, helped him to grow. Instead you sent him back to merge with his earlier self. You turned him into a loop, when he could have healed and regained his immortality."

"I thought… that that might fix it. That he'd remember, and it would change time, and he'd live."

"You unconscionable _moron_. Didn't you remember that Q nicknamed him Trelane because she said he was destined to control three timelines? When you prepared to send him back, how did it not occur to you that you were just looping, that your action must naturally be the reason she knew something of what would become of him, and that the way to change time was to _not_ send him back?"

"No, that never occurred to me, for the simple reason that I've known for centuries that Q was bullshitting all of you when she claimed _that_ was the reason he was called Trelane. Yes, yes, three paths of time in the _future._ Who nicknames a kid based on the future? Ever? It's not stable." Q glares at his friend. "Three ways, Q. Three paths, three patterns… three parents. He was nicknamed for how he was created, and she just made that crap up about three lanes of time so no one would guess what she really meant." The Q are all called Q, in mortal speech (or whatever the name of their species translates to, in any particular mortal language), and to each other, in the Continuum, their "names" are untranslatable multi-dimensional constructs that are, essentially, pictures of their essence. But it doesn't stop them from giving each other nicknames. "Trelane" is actually a fairly terrible translation of Trelane's nickname in the Continuum, Q reflects -- the "lane" part is better translated as "way" or "path", and of course to really get "three" in English it should have been Trey or Tri – but the boy was just a small child when he put together a translation of his nickname for the benefit of his human, English-speaking toys, based on the form of English spoken several hundred years ago. It was forgivable that he hadn't produced the most accurate translation, at the time, and after that it was his name among humans, so he was stuck with it.

"Why would she nickname him in a way that expressed, in plain sight, the truth he could have been killed for, if anyone else guessed? Q _loved_ Trelane. She wouldn't have risked him that way."

Q shutters his shields down on a sudden wave of guilt and exhausted sorrow, looking inside himself rather than at the other. "We thought… at the time, we thought I had some chance of getting the Continuum to grant me parental rights. We didn't realize when we added me to him that we'd have to keep it secret his entire childhood, that the Continuum would… _despise_ me quite as much as they do. I thought I could prove myself by doing my job better. I didn't realize until much later that they just don't want _anyone_ actually doing the job they let me be created to do, anymore."

He refocuses his attention on his friend. "Anyway, do you seriously think that if I hadn't sent him back in time they wouldn't have killed him? They killed Q and Q for spending too much time with mortals and trying to commit unauthorized procreation in a mortal form. They threw me out of the Continuum and nearly got me killed for _much_ less than attempting to destroy the multiverse. And by now everyone knows he's mine as much as yours and Q's. The Continuum would have executed a being who used the Heart of the Storm to lock them up and then proceeded to try to destroy the multiverse _anyway_, child or no, accident or no, and my parentage would give them double the justification. Sending what was left of him back to rejoin the rest of his self was the only way I could preserve even that tiny piece of him."

"You didn't consult me. Or Q. We were the ones who were his _acknowledged_ parents, who raised him from infancy. And you simply took it on yourself to try to alter time, and instead created the loop we have always existed in, because you knew better. Because you thought you knew the only reason for his nickname, without considering for a moment that perhaps Q had more than one reason for calling him Trelane, and perhaps she was telling the truth about what she'd seen of his future."

The Q don't specifically have the ability to see their own future – they live in the linear timeline of the Continuum, and can't go forward in it any more than the average human can go forward in their timeline – but because the Q interact with the universe the mortals live in, and can move freely in _that_ timeline, they often meet Q from the Continuum's future or past, and so they all accept that any given Q might have been granted some insight from the future. Obviously what Trelane's mother learned from the future fragment of her son wasn't that he would die, consumed by the Heart of the Storm after his integrity was breached by one of his own fathers; all she apparently learned from the piece was that someday Trelane would control three timelines. This wouldn't have inherently implied that he would try to _merge_ them; a Q controlling three timelines would merely be an impressive feat, not the blow for chaos and destruction it had proven to be.

"If I'd consulted you, what would you have done? Kept him around here until the Continuum tore him from your hands and dissolved him? What I did was the only way possible to save that fragment of his existence at all."

"You don't know that. You didn't discuss it with us, we didn't make plans, I did no research on the matter… you went with your impulse, the way you always do. The way you created him in the first place. And now he is dead, and Q may as well be dead, and I blame you. If you hadn't added your pattern to his, he wouldn't have been unstable enough to do what he did. If I had _known_ your pattern was in his, if you hadn't kept the knowledge from me, I'd have better known what to watch out for. If you hadn't sent the fragment back, it would have changed the timeline, since it's obvious in retrospect that we live in the timeline where you _did_ send it back, and maybe none of this would have happened. But you did all of these things. And now my son is dead and my love is gone forever."

Really there's nothing Q can say to that. He's tried to defend himself, but the truth is, he knows his friend is right. Of all the people who could have stopped this, who could have saved Trelane somewhere along the way, he's the one who had the most opportunities to act, and the one who failed to act on any of them. He killed his little boy with his own hands – well, literally, with Picard's hands, but with his own powers, his own essence – because by that time, there had been nothing else he could have done. But it is his fault that matters ever came to that, at all. Trelane's mother and acknowledged father share some of the guilt, yes, but in the end he's the one who could most easily have prevented the situation, and didn't.

"What do you want me to say?" he whispers. "Yes, fine. It was my fault. I shouldn't have made him as he was, I should have trusted you with the truth, I shouldn't have mentored him, I should have watched him more closely… I should have recovered faster, regained my memories more quickly, so I could have stopped his cognate from using the machine in the first place… I should have found a way. But I didn't. Do you think it accomplishes anything to _tell_ me any of this? Do you truly think I don't know?"

"I think there is something you don't know, yes," Trelane's father says softly.

"And that would be what?"

"That I am going to make you pay for this," the other says, still in that horribly quiet mindvoice with all the emotion stripped from it. "That I will be watching, waiting for an opportunity. And if you make another mistake, if you give me a single opening in all of eternity, I will lead the Continuum against you, I will bring all of this up to the Convocation and argue for your destruction. And if I can persuade the Continuum to strip you of your power and exile you again, I will make sure that some enemy far more dire and cruel than the Calamarain learns exactly where you are. And if I can persuade the Continuum to execute you outright, I will be the one to carry out the sentence, and I will make sure you die in as much pain as my little boy suffered. I will stand in the way of your plans, I will argue against anything you propose, and I will make you a laughingstock in the Continuum. And you will make a mistake. You're careless, and impulsive, and I have all of eternity. Someday you will give me an opening, and I will use it to crush you completely."

The words hit Q like a blow. Not because of the threats per se – he's heard such threats from other Q before. But because of who they come from. This entity before him swearing eternal vengeance was once one of his two best friends. So of his closest friends in the Continuum, one is gone forever and one has just declared himself an enemy for all of time.

It hurts more than he would ever have imagined, almost as much as killing Trelane hurt. He's effectively alone in the Continuum now – any of his other friends will probably take the scientist's side, or already hate him for the grief he brought to Q, never mind how much of it she brought on herself by asking him to join her in the first place. But then, he has caused the death of the child who depended on him… the child who was his own, as much as Q and Q's… the child he loved. If the entire Continuum hates him for what he's done… maybe it's what he deserves.

He has enough pride, enough defensiveness, not to admit this. Instead he says, flippantly, "Stand in line, Q. There's no shortage of others in the Continuum who've already sworn their eternal vengeance. What's one more?"

"Yes, this is hardly the first time you've made an enemy." The other steps back from him slightly. "But, Q? This is the first time you've made an enemy who knows your weak points as well as I do."

And he vanishes.

And he's right. A friendship of millions of years gives two beings plenty of time to learn every weakness, every fear and sorrow and broken place, of the other. If it were to be him that the Continuum sided with, and if he were to have the stomach for it, he is quite capable of destroying his former friend completely. But the guilt, the grief, overwhelm him so totally he knows he can't recruit allies against his old friend… he's not even sure he'll be able to fight back, when it comes to it. And his old friend will have no such compunctions against him.

Perhaps, if he manages to survive the next few millennia, someday Trelane's other father will forgive him, and they can at least be civil to each other, even if their friendship is gone forever. But to be honest, he doubts it. Q is quick to anger and quick to forgive; he doesn't hold grudges, not for eternity anyway. His old friend, though… It is very, very hard to anger him, but when he hates, he hates forever.

Again Q stares into nothing, and wishes he could summon up his usual talent for scapegoating, wishes he could blame any of this on anyone other than himself. But he can't find a way to escape the guilt.

Perhaps, if his friend _does_ destroy him someday, it will be a mercy.


	15. Fifteen: Knitting

Picard stirs restlessly in his sleep. Q, sitting on the bed next to him, looks down at him with concern. He's pale and drained; sleep no longer revitalizes him, which is directly Q's fault, but it's not as if there's an alternative.

Reluctantly, because it would be better for Picard to let him sleep unmolested but this has to be done, Q draws free a small amount of Picard's mental energy in the shape of the pattern of his mind, and weaves it into the new pattern growing inside the human fetus.

Picard coughs and opens his eyes. Exhausted eyes fix blearily on Q. "Surprised... you're... still here."

"It's not as if I have anywhere else vitally important to be at the moment."

"Yes, but." He carefully levers himself to a sitting position. "It can't be very entertaining to watch me sleep." He sounds tired, but now that he's awake and alert, much less bleary and slurred than he was a moment ago. Funny how humans replenish their mental energy so swiftly.

"Oh, I'm hard at work, believe me," Q says.

"Really? Doing what?"

"Knitting."

Picard laughs. "Even under the... current circumstances, I have difficulty imagining you knitting baby booties, Q."

"Oh, the foolishness of humanity." Q grins sardonically. "I'm not knitting _booties_, Picard. I'm knitting the _baby._"

Picard blinks. "I rather thought it would assemble itself on its own. The same as if... you were human. Or it was."

"Amanda's parents did much more work than I first realized. The human fetus is just a human fetus. The child's Q-nature is growing concurrently in its brain, but since I'm the only Q parent it's got, it was coming out as a clone of _me_, which would totally miss the point. So..." Q sighs. "I'm afraid I must admit, I'm responsible for your current state of exhaustion. I need to add your... well, your mental energies. Your personality, your _nature_ as a mind. Otherwise it won't matter that the human DNA is half yours; the personality will still be only mine, and frankly, one of me is quite enough for the Continuum."

Picard sits up properly. "Well, I don't doubt that," he says wryly. "But... explain. You're taking away parts of my mind?" In his tone is the clear message _That's not what I signed on for when I agreed to this._

"No, no. I'm taking your _energy_, which you replenish every time you eat and breathe, from your brain, where it's formed in the shape of your mental pattern. Think of it as mental DNA. The trouble is that you're human, so your energy's finite, unlike mine. You need to burn food and air to restore your energy, and normally sleep lets you order your pattern properly to maximize the flow of energy, but I'm disrupting that." Q shrugs. "On the other hand, _I_ can't breathe, have turned into something grotesque and misshapen even for a human form, and I keep actually needing to eat even though I _am_ supposed to have infinite energy. And by the way, you humans have no concept of how disgusting that is."

Picard laughs again. "Oh, yes, this whole thing is just a terrible humiliation for you. I'm so very sorry."

"Well, if Janeway had done what by _all_ rules of fairness and logic she _should_ have done, given that this entire war is _her_ fault..."

"But she was right, Q. It was wrong of you to ask her to make all the sacrifices to solve your problem."

"And in what sense is _stars_ blowing up not humanity's problem too?"

"Well, of course it is. That's why I agreed to do this with you. And why I still agree, despite the fact that you didn't warn me you'd be donating my life force to the child while I slept without telling me." His eyes soften. "You know, you're much harder on yourself than you need to be. For once. Human _female_ bodies aren't grotesque or misshapen in pregnancy at all. You're still quite beautiful."

"I'll never get over how shallow you humans are. Grow a pair of breasts, decrease the size of my nose and browline, add a little fat to soften my face and grow my hair a bit, and all of a sudden someone you couldn't stand to see before is beautiful. Doesn't that strike you as a tad hypocritical?"

"Not really. I couldn't stand to see you because you kept putting my _ship_ in danger or humiliating me. And the one other time you did come to me for help, it was to save your own skin from the repercussions of a well-deserved punishment, not to stop a war that threatens the safety of the universe. If you'd asked, I would have admitted that you were a reasonably handsome man, but you rarely left me in much of a mood to appreciate that fact. And, I confess, my small, underevolved human brain _does_ experience a much stronger appreciation for female beauty than male. I admit it, that's a flaw I don't seem to be able to overcome. But if you hadn't wanted to deal with someone of such a primitive species, you didn't _have_ to ask me to father your child."

She grins. "Well, yes, but after Janeway turned me down who else was I supposed to ask?"

"I'm sure I can't imagine. You had an entire universe of options."

"Ah, yes, but this war is humanity's fault. If Janeway hadn't ruled in Q's favor to allow him to kill himself, we wouldn't be fighting now. And as you've noticed, even if I _have_ made the fantastic sacrifice of enduring this hideous state you humans call pregnancy, the mortal parent of the child must make sacrifices as well. It would be terribly unfair to drain some poor hapless Romulan male of his lifeforce and ruin his sleep to create a baby to stop a war that _humans_ were instrumental in starting."

"And, of course, you've always had such grave concern for fairness," Picard says, deadpan.

"I'm fairness incarnate, Picard. Couldn't you tell?"

"I don't know how I ever missed that."

"It's because you have a small, underevolved and primitive mind, but I forgive you, _mon capitaine._ You are, after all, only human."

He slides closer to her, sitting right next to her, almost whispering in her ear – a stunt he can only pull off while they're both sitting on the bed, because even in her female form she's taller than he is when they're standing. "It had nothing whatsoever to do with any emotional weakness, any soft spot in your heart for a specific human."

"Of course not. I'm as logical as a Vulcan." She looks at him with an expression full of fake sincerity, which is one way to disguise the impact of the truth in her words. "I picked the human who had the best genetic traits to contribute to my child. Since she _will_ need to stop a war, after all. A human with a track record of diplomacy –"

"Mm-hmm." He puts an arm around her shoulders. She's been in this body, unable to change form or return to the Continuum or even use her powers in any significant way lest her enemies figure out where she is, for months of solid, linear time, longer than she's ever been in matter before. The body's biological reactions have started to seriously affect her mental state. She can't stop herself shivering with pleasure, leaning into his touch. It's an artifact, a mere side effect of wearing a mammalian body, let alone one surging with hormones, for so long, but it feels good and after so much death, so much fear and horror and the blood of brother and sister Q on her hands, Q has very little ability to resist anything that feels good. Especially because most of what this body has made her put up with during this pregnancy has been so very annoying.

But she continues anyway, pretending she hasn't just given herself away. "—with leadership qualities, who can win a war but despises having to fight one... why, if it weren't for the difficulties with your human genders and the fact that my enemies were staking you out, I'd have come here first. It's simply about what's best for the Continuum, you see."

"Of course it is," he says blandly.

And then she's tired of pretending. She kisses him, or lets him kiss her – she's not entirely sure who started it, and doesn't really care. Her best friend and closest companion of billions of years died to help Q reach this ship and talk to Picard, and Riker is currently wielding _her_ powers in the Continuum, advising her friends and fellow believers in the cause of change on how to make and win war, and they're facing death and atrocity while she has a parasite feeding off her. She hates everything about this stupid plan, except for the fact that it might work and for the fact that human sex, hell, human _affection_ from Picard turned out to feel so very good.

The enemy stakeout and the not-wanting-to-be-pregnant thing weren't her only reasons for not coming to Picard in the first place; after putting him on trial for being grievously savage, she really hadn't wanted to admit that the Q were having a civil war. But Picard had taken it very well, with the barest minimum of throwing the hypocrisy in her face, and since she took a female form he's been... not soppy, not weak and ridiculous like he'd been with Vash or Kamala, still a worthy opponent in a battle of wits, but gentle and affectionate as well. Maybe it's the human body talking and not the superior hyper-evolved mind, but she's found she _likes_ it when Picard calls her beautiful, even though it's objectively not true since this human female body now resembles a balloon more than a humanoid, or when he leans against her or caresses her or rubs the back she has to constantly use a low-grade level of her power on to keep it from hurting like it did the one day she was truly human.

"Since your knitting project seems to be keeping me awake," Picard says, "perhaps we could find something entertaining to do to pass the time and help me get back to sleep?"

"I was thinking something similar," Q says. "Except for the part about you going back to sleep. We can do without that."

"I'm not exactly a young man anymore, Q. I doubt very much I could manage to do anything _all_ night. And I do have a ship to command."

"We're in the space between galaxies, five hundred thousand years in the past, thirty thousand light years away from any inhabited star." Where no Q would ever think to look for her, or the _Enterprise_. She hopes. As long as Riker's using her powers in the Continuum, and she doesn't use them here, her enemies will probably think she's in the Continuum and not bother to look in the matter universe; at least, that's the plan. "I don't think anything's going to come up in the morning that Data can't handle."

"Perhaps so, but I am tired. I haven't been sleeping well, if you recall."

She buries her face against his ear. "Oh, you'll sleep, Jean-Luc. Eventually. But this body's currently being subjected to all kinds of interesting hormonal states, and I do have enough power that without alerting the Continuum I can still make sure you stay wide awake until _I'm_ satisfied."

"Well, it'd be very ungentlemanly of me to leave a lady unsatisfied in any case. Though, as feminine as you may be at the moment, I'm not sure you qualify for the term 'lady.'"

Q grins. "This from a man who slept with Vash."

"I never said Vash qualified for the term 'lady', either. But I'm not interested in discussing other women at the moment."

"Of course not." She can't dematerialize his sleepwear – that would involve drawing enough power that it could alert the enemy-- but it's a robe and boxers, and it's almost more fun to slide her hands inside it. "Right now we should only be discussing you and me."

"I've a better idea. Discussing things at all involves the use of our mouths. There's certainly better uses we could be putting them to than having a discussion."

She opens her mouth to say that she agrees, and he demonstrates by kissing her before she can get the words out. Normally she doesn't let other people get the last word in, but this one time, perhaps she can make an exception.


	16. Sixteen: Assassin Revisited

The interesting thing about the Q who was born a human named Amanda, Q reflects, is that her human origins makes her almost invisible in the Continuum when she wants to be. During the war, she was one of their deadliest fighters because unlike the vast majority of Q, she was actually capable of sneaking up on her fellow Q, most of whom she shot without any warning.

He supposes, as he looks at the gun she holds trained on him, that it's a mark of her former regard for him that she actually gave him warning before firing.

"Amanda?" he says, deliberately using her human name to remind her of who she was before he brought her to the Continuum – to remind her that without him, she wouldn't _be_ in the Continuum. "Would you mind pointing that thing someplace else?"

She smiles thinly. "That would miss the point, Q. I just found out a very interesting piece of information. Want to guess what it was?"

"You learned how to make public service announcements for the children of the Continuum and that's why you're doing a little play about why you should not point guns at your old mentor."

"I found out that my old mentor, as you put it, executed my parents." Her shields are totally closed. He has no way of telling what she actually feels, outside of the controlled information she lets out by speaking to him.

"Who told you that?"

"Does it matter? I verified the information against the Continuum's historical records. It's true."

"And it doesn't occur to you that coming after me with a gun might be exactly what the person who gave you the information was counting on you to do?"

"Maybe it was. It doesn't change the fact that you _killed my parents_, you bastard." The shield cracks just a tiny bit, letting through a blast of rage, grief and betrayal. "You told me they were your friends! You told me you disagreed with the decision to kill them!"

This might actually be serious. Q is getting alarmed. This is one of his private pocket dimensions, not the Continuum proper, but since he used to rely on Amanda to babysit his son a good deal, Amanda has the keys to all his private dimensions, just as his son does. He can't contact the Continuum proper directly from here; he has to send a message out the same way he would go if he fled, and he remembers how quick Amanda's reflexes were in the war. If Amanda seriously wants to kill him, she can probably actually do it; he can't manifest a gun faster than she can shoot the one she's already manifested, and if he either calls for help or tries to teleport out, she'll be able to sense the action before it's completed and shoot him. Of course she'll be executed herself if she does it – the new rules of the Continuum have no more tolerance for the murder of a fellow Q than the old rules would have, had the murder of a fellow Q even been possible before the guns – but it's possible that she doesn't care.

"Everything I told you was true, Amanda." He sighs. "I _didn't_ approve of the decision to kill your parents. I argued against it. If you checked Continuum records, you must have seen that."

"Yes, I saw that. I also saw that the decision to kill them was unanimous, no one abstaining. Well, except for my parents themselves, and Quinn, who was in a comet at the time. But you were there."

"The vote wasn't on whether or not to kill your parents. The vote was on whether or not the law, as recorded, required that we kill your parents. And unfortunately, the law was pretty unambiguous. If there had been a number of others who agreed with me that your parents _shouldn't_ die, regardless of what the law said, I could have made a motion to change the law on the basis that the law wasn't fair. But only two other Q agreed with me that your parents shouldn't be killed; I could have made a motion but it wouldn't have carried. It would, in fact, have had no impact whatsoever. I already _knew_ that, because I'd spent weeks at that point arguing that it wasn't fair to kill them, regardless of whether or not it was the law."

"You couldn't cast a protest vote?"

"When you're looking at a text that says 'Green is up,' and the question is, 'Does the text say green is up?', you can't vote no just because green is not up. You're not being asked 'does this make any sense' but 'does this text say a certain thing'. If I had cast a protest vote in favor of 'the text does not say green is up' when in fact it does, because I strongly believed that the text was wrong, I would have been ignored as a troublemaker and an obstructionist... believe me, that's happened enough times that I knew better. If I had done that they would have ignored everything I had to say on the matter, or any other matter, for the next thousand years or so. The only way I could retain enough power to do _anything_ about the situation was to agree that yes, the text does say green is up. The laws said your parents had to die."

"If the law was that unambiguous why did you even put it to a vote?"

"Because you can't take a step like killing a Q without voting on every aspect of it, including on whether your actions are legally justified. It was a formality, Amanda. The decision had already been made."

"And then you killed them. _You_, personally."

"Your mother would have wanted it that way."

Now raw fury blazes for a moment out the cracks in her shielding. "She would have _wanted_ it that way? Wanted to be murdered by her close friend?"

"Yes. Because the alternative would have been that she be murdered by someone who would have killed her baby, too."

"Oh, I see. You're trying to claim that you saved my life?"

"I'm not 'trying' to claim anything. I did save your life. Do you actually know why your parents were killed?"

"Because they wouldn't return to the Continuum when they were ordered to, and they wouldn't stop using their powers."

"That was the proximate reason. And it was reasonably valid, on the face of it. There are those in the Continuum who believed at the time – probably some who still do believe, though we kicked their side to the curb in the war – that when Q spend their time and emotional energy outside the Continuum, it weakens our unity and risks discontinuity. And even if that's not true, it's wrong to live among mortals, interacting as if you were one of them, while still using your powers. It runs the risk of abusing power. You know that's why we wanted you to come to us instead of staying with humanity."

"But you're going to tell me that wasn't the only reason."

"That's exactly right, in fact. Many Q were _terrified_ of you. There had never before been a Q child... and, as I'm sure you've realized by now, a lot of us don't deal well with change." He smiles wryly. "Your parents didn't want to return to the Continuum because they were afraid that if they did so, you would die, or at the very least your Q nature would; they were quite sure that bringing you into the Continuum would kill you, and they feared that if they cut themselves off from you so they could go back without you, that your development as a Q would cease, or be stunted. They thought, naively, that the Continuum would grant them more time, for your safety – they never comprehended that many Q actually _wanted_ you destroyed, that you threatened them."

He shakes his head, remembering. "You need to understand this, Amanda. I loved your mother. She was one of my closest friends, as committed to the cause of transforming the Continuum as I was. I didn't really care so much about your father – he was kind of her sidekick. He'd do anything she wanted because he was obsessed with her. But if there had been _anything_ I could have done to save your mother, I'd have done it. I tried my best to talk her into coming home, leaving you behind. I tried to make it clear to her what the stakes were, that she was being manipulated into breaking the law. It's very, very difficult for a Q not to use our powers, to truly limit ourselves to the capabilities of a mortal body; our powers are second nature. Some have managed, but most don't even try. Your parents had no experience with trying to do without their powers. They were set up to fail."

"Why couldn't you have taken away their powers, then? The Continuum did it to _you_."

"Taking away my powers was a punishment. Until your parents broke the rules, they hadn't technically done anything bad enough to justify such a punishment, and after they broke the rules, it would have been too little too late... I never out and out refused to obey an order of the Continuum. And no one would have proposed it, because those of us that didn't secretly want them dead for daring to do something no one had done before wanted them to come home. I didn't _want_ them to be mortal, to face the possibility of death... I wanted them to realize how hard the task they'd set for themselves was, and give it up. I underestimated how much they loved you – I didn't understand it until I became a parent myself. None of us had ever been parents. We couldn't have known that your parents would never have willingly abandoned you."

"So you killed them."

"Someone was going to kill them. I couldn't stop that from happening. I tried, but it was impossible. The only thing I could do was to be the one who carried it out. Because any other Q would have killed you. You were mortal then, as vulnerable as any human baby. It would have been very, very easy to kill you along with your parents and call it collateral damage. No one else who was willing to carry out the Continuum's orders would have saved you; no one else who was willing to protect you was willing to do the Continuum's dirty work. I was the only one who could bring myself to kill people I cared for to protect what they would have died to preserve. You know, I'd actually asked your mother about that. I told her that the Continuum might execute her and her boyfriend if she wouldn't leave you behind and come home. She didn't believe me, but she said that even if what I was saying was true, she would die rather than leave you alone and unprotected. She was willing to die to save you. I couldn't save her life, Amanda, but if I volunteered to be the one to kill her, I could save what she valued more than her life."

Her eyes narrow – or rather, since they're both in native form, not in human bodies, she projects the emotion that would be signified if a human's eyes narrowed. "You did it all for me," she says, with just the tiniest note of sarcasm.

"Yes," he says, trying to ignore the signs that she simply doesn't believe him, or doesn't care. After everything they've been through together, everything he's done for her, it would be too horribly ironic if she killed him. He refuses to believe that she'll actually do it. "And I made sure you ended up on the _Enterprise_ so that I would be the one assigned to assess you, after you started to manifest your powers."

"I won that internship!"

"No, you didn't." He does not, quite, do the Q equivalent of rolling his eyes, but some of the sentiment comes through. "Oh, your grades were superb, of course, and your essay was spot on, and there's no question that you _deserved_ that internship. You were competing against mortals, after all; even untrained, your base intelligence as a Q was far greater than any of them. But 1500 mortals were competing for 10 internship spots, and the _Enterprise_ was the flagship, the _crème de la crème_. And your interview, to put it bluntly, sucked. You whispered instead of speaking clearly, you looked at your feet a lot, you um'd and ah'd and said 'I think' and 'that's just my opinion' instead of having confidence in your ideas, and you acted as if you had no idea that you were even the equal of the others, let alone the person who had gotten the highest scores on their tests, ever. They _might_ have given you an internship based on your scores, but it wouldn't have been _Enterprise_... and they might have decided that your lack of confidence in yourself was too crippling to justify giving you a slot."

"I was scared! And I didn't want to act arrogant. My mother and father – my _human_ mother and father – always taught me it was wrong to act as if I was better than everyone else."

"I'm sure that's a very wise lesson to teach a human child who is not only a greater genius than human minds can imagine, but is genetically indistinguishable from one of the engineered supermen they love to discriminate against. But you know perfectly well that it nearly destroyed you as a Q. The war was the best thing that happened to you after you joined the Continuum; you could barely hold your own against any one single Q before that. I couldn't both focus on teaching you to stand up to me _and_ persuade you to come to the Continuum; the stakes were too high, and the Q who took you in after that... well, I'm sure she did her best, since you eventually did have the self-confidence to dump her and join our side."

"And you'd all have been dead if I hadn't."

"Yes, we would have. I'm eternally grateful to you for that, Amanda, you know that I am. It benefited you as well, of course, since their side would never have continued to tolerate you... do you know that my original orders, which were heavily influenced by people we fought against in the war, weren't to persuade you to come to the Continuum? Originally I was just supposed to kill you."

"But, of course, you didn't. Because my mother would have wanted you to save me. Yadda yadda blah blah blah."

"You can be as sarcastic about it as you want; I suppose I deserve that. But yes, I did fight for your life. I arranged for you to end up on the _Enterprise_ specifically to make sure that they _had_ to send me; I was the Q for humanity, so they should have sent me, given that you were human or thought you were, but if you had stayed on your little colony world or gone to a different ship, they might have argued that I'd demonstrated I wasn't objective, and sent someone else, who would simply have killed you. Remember, many of them wanted you dead. You represented change, and you know as well as I do they didn't like change. With you on the _Enterprise_, though... no other Q would dare intrude on my territory, and the _Enterprise_ was _mine._ And when they told me to kill you, I insisted that you deserved the chance to join us. You had to be willing – no one wants to put up with a Q who doesn't want to be here, sulking at us for all eternity – but you were connected to the Continuum, you were drawing power from it, you were even listening to us when your human consciousness slept. You were a Q, and you'd done nothing wrong. Our jurisprudence doesn't have a lot of wiggle room in it for ignorance of the law, given that Q are generally never ignorant of the law, and you had been living among mortals and using your powers in unauthorized ways... occasionally to harm others. Remember Stacy Rembrandt?"

She nods. "I never actually meant to hurt her. I didn't know that wishing that all her hair would fall out would actually make her go bald."

"Of course. Humans wish horrible things on their enemies all the time, without fear of consequence because they know it won't actually happen. I had to persuade the Continuum to actually take into account your background and level of training – not a concept we were used to, particularly in dealing with other Q -- to recognize that you deserved no less than your parents got. You needed to be given a chance to come home to the Continuum and join us. We would have offered any Q the same; it was discrimination that your origin as a human infant was being held against you."

"But you would have killed me anyway. If I refused."

He sighs. "You know... you're right. I didn't want to do that, and I was a coward for letting them push me on it. They'd taken away my powers for my flouting the spirit of the law too often, as you know, and... I was afraid they'd do it again. But I did everything in my power to make sure it wouldn't come to that. Including, after Picard _told_ you what I'd told him about your parents... and I still can't believe he was such an insensitive moron as to _do_ that, given what was at stake... I knew you were going to refuse me, out of spite and anger at what we did to your parents. I knew you would do what Picard obviously wanted you to do, and choose humanity. So I told you we would let you stay if you could refrain from using your powers, so you would feel you weren't being coerced. I gave you the space you needed to make the free choice you wanted, in your heart of hearts, to make."

"Are you telling me that you _lied_ about that? That if I'd chosen to stay human, you'd have killed me anyway?"

"Oh, come now, Amanda, be realistic. Your parents couldn't stop themselves from using their powers, and they had training. Without full control over your own powers... you'd have used them. Eventually. And then I would have had to kill you. I was hoping it wouldn't come to that, and I was also hoping that I could negotiate with the Continuum to give you more time to make the decision if it did come to that, so if you did use your powers, I'd be given the freedom to come back and use that to persuade you to join us again, instead of being forced to execute you. But you know very well you didn't know how to _not_ use your powers. The conscious uses, yes, but humans _sleep._ Sooner or later you'd have gone to bed and while you slept someone you didn't like would die horribly, or suddenly become your best friend ever, or simply disappear from reality. Or someone you wanted would fall as madly in love with you as Riker did, and you wouldn't have realized you were the one who did it, so you wouldn't release them in time. Or you'd have been faced with the sudden death of someone you cared about... and you had that Starfleet disease where you cared about _everyone_... and you'd have acted to save them. As you did."

"You told me you didn't trigger that ecological disaster from coming to a crisis right then."

"I didn't. I knew it was on its way and I was stalling for time, hoping to keep you from making any kind of final decision until it happened, because I _knew_ what you'd do. I didn't cause it, Amanda. You know, by that point you were attuned closely enough to the Continuum that I couldn't have lied to your face."

"But you lied that I had a choice."

"I only got away with that because I was focused on ways that I could give you more time to make the choice. Fundamentally, you didn't have a choice because fundamentally, you couldn't have stopped yourself from using your powers. But you did have the freedom to say 'no' to me then and there without dying, and I would have kept coming back, trying to persuade you otherwise. You could see that my surface thoughts, that I was going to give you the freedom to say no without killing you, matched what I was saying, and I _was_ at least adept enough to keep you from seeing any deeper than that. You may have been a Q, but _most_ Q can't see any deeper than that into me if I don't want them to."

"Why couldn't you have taken _my_ powers away? You said you wouldn't do that to my parents before they disobeyed because it was a punishment, but I wouldn't have seen it as a punishment."

"Oh yes you would have." He shakes his head. "A human brain can't contain the totality of a Q. As soon as you connected to the Continuum you started to outgrow the limits of your human form, and if we had cut you off you wouldn't have fit anymore. To take your powers away, I would have had to essentially lobotomize you – cut off parts of your mind that could no longer fit in your human brain."

"That's not what happened to you."

"Firstly, that _is_ what happened to me, and secondly, I knew it was coming and could make sure that my core self, that the parts of my mind and personality that most define _me_, were the parts that were in the human brain when they broke the connection. I couldn't have done that for you without mentally raping you. You know what we think of a Q who breaks into another Q's mind and rearranges it, even if it's to save their life. You didn't know who you were, you didn't know what parts of you were in the Continuum versus in your brain at any given moment; how could you have been expected to know how to preserve your core identity, or even know that you needed to do it? All Q believe that death is preferable to losing parts of our selfhood, or being forcibly transformed into someone else. Forgive me for assuming that you would hold such a thing as anathema as we did."

"All right then." She shakes her head slightly. "You killed my parents because it was the only way to save my life. You manipulated me to save me, you lied to me and to Captain Picard to save me, everything you did was for me. You're just a swell, standup guy. So can you explain to me, then, why the _way_ you killed my parents was some kind of sick joke?"

If he had a heart, it would lurch right then. "What do you mean?" he asks, the hope and confidence he'd been feeling starting to melt into dread.

"I mean they were killed by a tornado. In _Kansas._ A house fell on them. The Wizard of Oz?" She scowls at him. "I didn't know you well enough, when I learned how they died, to know how much that fits your style. And when I knew you well enough, I believed you that you cared about my parents, that you'd tried to stand up for them to the Continuum. You really did seem sincere, Q, even after we'd been in the Continuum for years together and I'd learned how to read you. And even now, talking to you... you say all the right things, and you project all the right emotions, and I can't feel anything dissonant leaking through your shielding." The gun doesn't waver, although if she were human, she would be crying now. "But you tell me, if you cared about my mother so _goddamn_ much, why did you make her death into a twisted joke? You killed her with a reference from a 20th century Terran movie. How sick is that? Especially to do to someone who cared about you, someone who thought you cared about her?"

And there's nothing he can say to that. Because Amanda has never been in the position of having to kill friends. In the war Amanda had killed more efficiently and coldly than any of them because the enemy _hadn't_ been her friends, her family, the people she had lived with for five billion years... to her, they had been the ones who killed her parents, the ones who had tried to hate her to death. Amanda has no idea what it feels like to kill people you've gamed with, shared pleasure with, gone on exploring expeditions with and sat around with having arguments for fun. Amanda lives now in a remade Continuum where no one _has_ to kill friends who only wanted a tiny bit of freedom, or else see their child murdered, or else lose everything and be blinded, crippled, lobotomized and exiled. She'll never know what it's like to have to distance oneself with black humor, make a joke out of a friend's death because that's the only way you can deal with doing what you have to do. She's too human to have a Q's sense of perspective about such things; what does it matter if your death is amusing or not, if you're going to be dead at all? But mortals, including humans, care more about the way they die, because they can't avoid the inevitability of it.

He knows, then, that Amanda will never understand, that to her the way he killed her parents will always be a sign of callousness, not a sign that he cared too much to endure doing it if he didn't take refuge in depersonalizing them, if he didn't distance himself with a dark joke. And he's never been very good at getting anyone to understand how he feels if they're coming from a different mindset, if they can't take for granted the same initial premises he's starting from. He will never convince her.

"Amanda," he says instead. "Don't do this. This isn't like the mortal world, where you can hope to hide what you've done. They'll know, and they'll execute you. Do you think that's what your parents would have wanted? They were willing to die for you; will you make their deaths be in vain, just because you think they deserve vengeance?"

"I've lived in the Continuum for thirteen thousand years. If I'd been human, I would have died a very long time ago. Death doesn't scare me." She raises the gun.

"Amanda, you _babysat_ my _son._ Please, don't."

"Did my parents beg, Q? Did they say 'you're our friend, please, don't?'"

"They didn't, actually. They knew I'd been sent by the Continuum. And I told them—" If he had a voice, it would be breaking. "I told them I would make sure you survived. And I did my best. But if you kill me, and the Continuum kills you—"

"Then you'll be too dead to worry about breaking your promise to them." She would have tears in her eyes if she had eyes, but her attention is fixed on him. "I fought in your war because they were the ones who killed them. They were the enemy, they destroyed my parents, they took from me the only chance I'd ever had to be raised by people who both loved and understood me. And now I find out it was you, all along? I trusted you, you were my mentor, you were my leader in the war, I'd have _died_ for you... I betrayed my other mentor to save you, to save your side... and it was you who killed them? All along?"

Her shielding is in tatters from the strength of her emotion. He knows what she's going to do before she does it, knows he has no further hope of talking her out of it. With nothing left to lose, he tries to run. But she's still so much faster with the weapons than any other Q. The teleport's incomplete and he's still half in this dimension when the shot tears through the part of him still here, shreds him and his reality both and pulls him back together from the teleport, snapping all that's left of him back into this pocket dimension like a rubber band releasing.

The physical pain is worse than anything he's felt as a Q, but it's the emotional pain that overwhelms him. She'd become like a daughter to him, and he's failed to stop her from destroying herself by destroying him. His promise to his friends, when he killed them, has been broken. The sacrifice he made by choosing to be the one who carried out their sentence, rendered in vain.

He'll never see his own son again.

He sees the look of horror and grief on her face and smiles bitterly. So she's having second thoughts. A little late now, aren't they? Whoever engineered this by telling her what he'd done, whatever old enemy from the war who sought to destroy them both at the same time... it was brilliantly done. If he knew who it was and was going to have time, he'd salute them. Well played, anonymous enemy.

And then there is a roaring of sensation, white light and sound and pain. Distantly he senses his pattern unraveling as he disappears, his energies melting back into the Continuum. And there is nothing more.


	17. Seventeen: The Possibilities Are Endless

With his companion at his side, Q watches the newly discorporeal former humans playing in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, zipping around the planet as trails of sentient energy, ducking and weaving through gaseous strata.

"Well, you made it," he says to his companion. "The next step of human evolution is finally under way."

"Did you doubt us?" the other Q, who was human himself a mere ten thousand years ago, asks.

"Not really. Though I'm actually kind of amazed it happened so early. I mean, when I told Riker that you folks were growing and evolving quickly, even I didn't guess you'd make it to a noncorporeal state within ten thousand years of achieving spaceflight. I think that beats out the last record."

"Well, if you don't count the Ocampa."

"Only six or seven Ocampa have made the changeover yet, and that's with generations that are ten times as fast as humans'. Their Caretaker really held them back; I expected them to have some massive changeovers occurring a few thousand years ago, but it never did."

"They look so… exuberant. So happy."

"Yeah, most beings are thrilled to achieve noncorporeality. It really is so much better than being made of matter." He looks at his companion. "Sorry you missed out. I wished you could have moved on with a whole cohort of other humans, rather than having to change species to achieve freedom from matter."

"No mortal, matter being has been able to endure living ten thousand years, Q. Even if you'd kept me alive, I'd be dead by now, or completely changed from the man I used to be." The other watches the former humans in their dance. It really is quite exuberant. "No, I'm glad you made the offer you did, when you did. I wouldn't have wanted to miss this."

"I'm glad I did too, Jean-Luc." Q smiles at his friend. In the Continuum, the "names" for individuals are icons, representations of the essence of the other Q as perceived by the Q who is speaking, and as such are tangled up in whatever emotion the speaker feels for the Q being addressed or described. Even though the Continuum has mellowed somewhat in its perception of strong emotion, Q still feels embarrassed using his friend's Q name in public, where others in the Continuum can see the intensity of the emotion he feels for the other, twined around his representation of the other's name. So, except in moments of private intimacy, he usually calls the other one by the wholly meaningless and arbitrary phonemes of the other's long-gone human name. "Did _you_ doubt them? Or were you as certain you'd see this day as I was?"

"I'm a bit more familiar with the dangers that stood in humanity's way than you were, having made a career fighting off those dangers. But I always knew that if we managed to survive the Borg and the Kiohari and the Nesh'tot and all the other dangers we encountered, then yes, someday we would achieve noncorporeality. Someday, I was sure, we would become a Power. Although at the time I didn't actually understand much of what that entailed, of course."

"Right. Everyone comes along thinking, oh boy, we have psi powers, now we're bodiless creatures of pure thought, great, we're gods now! And then they figure out that they're still pretty little fish in a very big pond."

"Well, not everyone can be the Q. Not as long as the Continuum continues its current policies, at least."

If Q were human, he would be drawing a deep breath now. "Do we have to start talking about that now? Come on, Jean-Luc, just savor the moment for a few. You made it. Humanity's undergoing the changeover to a lesser Power."

"It's very exciting, yes." Jean-Luc's aura changes slightly, reflecting a bit of melancholy, a bit of wistfulness. "Although it is a little bit saddening as well."

"Saddening? What do you mean?"

"Well, obviously, the majority of humanity hasn't made the changeover yet. There's the resistance to it, the fear of the unknown many of them are experiencing. It'll be quite some time before every human being has become bodiless. And… honestly… those that have made the changeover aren't really human, are they? Any more than I am. So much of the human condition was being mortal, finite, made of mere matter. The species that birthed me, that shaped me, that created all the cultures I knew when I was growing to adulthood… soon they will be no more."

"I suppose that is a bit sad when you think about it. It's not very easy for me to relate to, since we were already Q when I was created, but some of the oldest must be familiar with that feeling. But then, few changes are wholly pleasant. Even your decision to come join us wasn't exactly something you had unmixed feelings about."

"Oh, I remember that well." Jean-Luc smiles, reminiscing. "There were many times I regretted my decision. Especially when I had to stand by and watch innocent people being destroyed. It was easier to accept the Federation's Prime Directive, since it's unilateral. The very fact that sometimes the Q _do_ interfere made it very hard to bear the times that you wouldn't, or the fact that you wouldn't let me take action you hadn't all authorized."

"Even though that's exactly what you demanded we do to you before you'd agree to join."

"Yes, even so."

Q didn't make the offer right away – he'd led up to it in stages. First, when Picard was an old man, alone on Earth and retired, with next to no contact with the friends he had that were still alive, Q came to him and offered him what Picard the starship captain would always have turned down – the opportunity to explore the universe with him – and that Picard, an old man with nothing left to look forward to but death, had had nothing left to lose. He accepted.

For over a hundred years, Picard remained Picard, human, anchored to the age he was when he first met Q, traveling the universe with Q and seeing what there was to see. Eventually, though, the differential power dynamic between the two of them became problematic. Picard felt blackmailed by Q's power, unable to risk having a serious argument because Q might simply abandon him in a galaxy where now almost none of the people he'd once cared for were still alive. Q felt limited by Picard's humanity. So Q petitioned the Continuum for what he wanted, and given his changed status in the Continuum since winning the war, he'd gotten it -- the right to offer Picard membership in the Q.

Picard was not tempted by omnipotence; in fact he still feared it. The idea of being Q's equal was attractive, but not attractive enough to give up his humanity. But Q had come up with an argument that Picard couldn't resist. For the past hundred years, Picard had been listening to Q complain about the Continuum, how everyone walked on eggshells now because they didn't know diplomacy, they didn't know tact, they had never needed to learn to get along without hurting each other because they'd never had the ability to hurt each other, only now there were guns and everyone lived in terror of them being used again. So when Q argued that the Continuum needed Picard's skills, needed to learn the arts of making peace now that they'd introduced themselves to the art of making war, Picard listened. And when Q argued that the Continuum needed new blood to avoid stagnation, and that this meant that aliens needed to be invited to join the Continuum to bring their cultures and unique perspectives lest the Q continue to die a slow death of boredom, Picard nodded. And when Q pointed out that if Picard were a Q he could bring his own philosophies, his own ideals, to the Continuum and try to convince the Q as a whole to adopt them, Picard was sold.

He had worried about going mad with power, about losing his ethics and unleashing a godlike raging id on the galaxy. So the Q had agreed to place him on a thousand years of training and probation, where he would not be permitted to directly interact with or intervene in the lives of any mortals, anywhere, for any reason. Since the Q also weren't awfully fond of the notion of companions having mentor/student relationships, almost all of his training had been conducted by other Q; "his" Q had been able to provide moral support and hang out with him during free time, but was entirely uninvolved with training him. Which, Q thinks now, was just as well. Even now, Jean-Luc believes in obeying the rules unless there's very good reason to break them, breaking them only after long thought and analysis of the pros and cons, and, in fact, doing things in general only after long thought and analysis. His entire style of being a Q is much more like what the Continuum has traditionally respected and valued than Q's own, and that helped to cement his position in the Continuum early on, something that might not have happened so quickly if it had been Q who trained him.

Of course, the hilarious thing is that for all his rule-abiding, Jean-Luc is more of a maverick, more of a game-changer, than Q ever imagined he would become, and Q had had hopes in that direction. In fact, Jean-Luc's ideas are so revolutionary they terrify _Q_, and he has _lived_ for change for millions of years.

"So." Jean-Luc says, focusing on him. "We've savored the moment, as you suggested. Are you ready to discuss moving forward with our plans, yet?"

No. Q isn't ready. He's not sure he'll ever be ready, and if he's not ready the Continuum cannot _possibly_ be ready. "I don't know. What you're proposing is _huge_, Jean-Luc. I don't even think you're aware of how big a step it is."

"Of course it's a big step. You've been alone here for billions of years, used to having the place, and the power it grants you, all to yourselves. Of course the thought of changing that is frightening." He leans forward. "But you know it has to be done."

"I do… I just don't know if now is the time."

"When will be the time, then?" Jean-Luc gestures, taking in the newly transformed energy beings who've made Jupiter their home. "How long will _they_ have to wait, or the Zakdorns, or the Siluri, or the Unity, because you were too afraid even to bring our proposal to the Continuum? How long will the Q retard the development of the other Powers of the universe to avoid ever having to share?"

In the beginning, billions of years ago, the Q created the Continuum, an oasis of order floating in the sea of chaotic, negentropic energy at the heart of the multiverse, out of all their minds in concert. It was, and it remains, the single greatest creation of any species anywhere in the multiverse. The Continuum contains a database of literally _everything_ in the universe, collected painstakingly by the Q over the course of billions of years, and it contains algorithms for doing anything from teleporting to creating pocket dimensions, that any Q can draw on without actually having to think through the details of what they're doing. With the power granted them by the Continuum, the Q can raise the dead, can construct identical copies of sentient beings or programmed, non-sentient simulacra that can, within defined parameters, think and feel. They can move fluidly in time, while still understanding and being able to use linear time and causality. They can make a mortal a Q, granting all of their powers, and they can take those powers away and make a Q into a mortal. Their range of abilities and the power levels they can access are greater than those available to any one other race of Powers in the universe.

The Continuum is, and has always been, solely for the Q. And the Q have never allowed another species to create something similar. Oddly enough, Jean-Luc actually agrees with that particular perspective – two Continuums might be able to compete with each other for control of reality in a way that no other two Powers can compete, and the conflict could tear the universe apart. Plus, the Q trust themselves to wield their power because they've integrated many checks and balances into their control over their own members; they cannot necessarily control another species that doesn't share their ideals. There can only be one Continuum – that is safest, for the preservation of the reality all sentient life must share.

But the Continuum also has a framework of law, and rules, and a tradition of debate, analysis and study. The Continuum has a history of bringing in new individuals from different cultures, who must be governed by the laws that govern all Q. Other Powers are collective minds, fully in harmony with one another, sharing all thoughts and goals, such as the Melkotians, the Thasians, the Vash'ta; or they are scattered, disparate, with no overarching structure, trusting to the ethics each individual was trained in, such as the Douwds, the Kalaydjians, the species that beings such as the Nagilum belong to. There is no other Power with so much structure for both accepting and controlling diversity, no other Power which holds as an ideal that many minds with totally different personalities and opinions should come together under the structure of law to form a unified whole.

The Q have long attempted to aid the growth of other species, helping others progress on their evolutionary path toward becoming a Power; but there is a wall they keep in the way, the roadblock that they will not permit any other to pass, and that is that no one else is allowed to make a Continuum, or anything like it. The old Powers of the universe were content with this; the status quo has been that the Q do not share their own unique privileges for so long that no one who has been a Power for billions of years feels any particular loss. They have all achieved their own perfection, and unlike the Q, they feel no need to strive to become more than they are. Only the Q suffer pain when they stagnate, because only the Q designed themselves to contain minds and personalities, like Q's own, that constantly crave new knowledge and new experiences.

But the Q are not the only beings in the universe capable of feeling that pain. The new Powers coming up in the universe – the Zakdorn, the humans, the El-Aurians, the beings that were once the Borg until they stopped assimilating by force and became the Unity instead – they will not be content to hit a wall. They will want to be everything they can possibly be. _Especially_ the humans. And the Q cannot allow them to create a new Continuum.

So, Jean-Luc proposed one day, why not open up the Continuum to them, and share it?

It was so audacious, so stunning, so transformative a plan that Q _still_ feels a desperate desire to make passionate love to Jean-Luc for being an entity that could come up with such an idea, every time he thinks of it… and yet, he's terrified. For billions of years _only_ the Q have shared the Continuum. Open it up to others? Allow not just one or two aliens who can be transformed into Q, but alien Powers that are not Q at _all_, to join in with the overmind of the Continuum? Be first among equals instead of dominant among gods? He knows the Continuum _needs_ such a transformation, and oh, he craves the disruption, the chaos, the _uncertainty_ it will cause, the opportunity for everything to be new again, to work out everything all over again and there will be conflict and there will be argument and there will be things worth _building_ once more and it will be glorious. But he's still a Q, even as much as he wants change, and the idea of radically transforming the Continuum in such a way frightens him as much as it excites him. Things have been a certain way for billions of years, and he can complain about being bored all he wants but if they change, he won't know everything anymore, he won't be in control or be able to predict what's going to happen anymore. The fear is almost paralyzing.

How can he bring such a plan before the Continuum? _He_ himself craves change more than any other Q (well, perhaps except for his son), and this idea terrifies him. What will the more conservative, the more staid, the more enamored of the status quo in the Continuum think? And given that he is perhaps the strongest proponent of change, doesn't that mean that _all_ of them will react with even more fear and far less delight than he has? Oh, he's been down the road of making proposals to the Continuum that no one wants to listen to before, and for himself, maybe the thought of becoming a laughingstock, again, wouldn't be so appalling, but the idea that Jean-Luc, who's such a young and untried Q and had such promise, could more or less ruin his credibility with the Continuum for the next several million years is deeply upsetting.

"I understand what you're saying. You know I agree with you. But… I'm going to be brutally frank here, this proposal scares _me_. And if it scares me, it's going to scare the others even more. And then they'll just tune out everything we have to say for the next several aeons."

"Then we'll have to make them listen." Jean-Luc is calm, focused. "Q, of course I understand what a drastic step this would be for all of you. I can understand why it frightens you. But it _has_ to be done. For the sake of the newer Powers, for the sake of preserving the Continuum from stagnation, for the sake of preventing future _wars between Powers._ It was terrible enough that you had a civil war; do you actually want to get into a conflict with a fellow Power because they feel that you stand in the way of their evolution?"

"Of course we don't, but… this is a huge, huge thing you're proposing. I really don't think you comprehend the magnitude of your suggestion. You grew up in a Federation. The idea of daily dealings with aliens, of sharing your resources and your legal system and even your DNA, with them is natural to you. It's been billions of years that we've been isolated in our own Continuum."

"And yet the majority of you spend as much time as you can _outside_ the Continuum, because the presence of the others has simply become too dull to be borne. Even with the children who've been born since I joined, so many of you prefer the company of anyone who isn't a Q to anyone who is. That's a serious problem for any species. Wouldn't it be better to invite other species to join in the Continuum than to hide away from the Continuum all the time out of contempt for and boredom with your fellow Q?"

"You don't need to convince me. It's _them_ you need to convince. Or, that _we_ need to convince. And I'm not sure we can."

"We do have allies. Your son will agree with us. Amanda. Q your elder sister, Q the inventor, Q your brother… those that most strongly agreed with you during the war, those that fought by your side… they will stand by the proposal, even if they're afraid."

"Yeah, but…"

"Q. Don't be impatient; we have eternity. We bring the proposal before them now, and begin the discussion. Most likely, most of them _won't_ agree. But we let them begin to think about it, and some will come to terms with the idea and recognize that it is, in fact, the best solution. And then we bring the proposal again, and again. And each time, we'll have more support, until, eventually, we'll win."

"You're very optimistic, _mon ami._"

"Of course I am. I was an optimistic human, ten thousand years ago, and see where it's brought me now." Jean-Luc smiles broadly. "Hasn't everything in my existence argued that in the long run, optimism usually is proven correct?"

"In the long run, maybe."

"Well, we can afford to look at the long run. But we can't afford to delay _beginning_ that long run. If it's going to take us thousands of years to get the Continuum to accept our proposal and open itself to the other Powers… shouldn't we get started right away?"

Q shakes his head, laughing. "Who would have ever thought, when you and I first met, that _you_ could come up with a plan to transform the Continuum that makes me and my ideas look positively stodgy? You always played by the rules, you always did what was expected of you, and yet, you're more revolutionary than I even dreamed of being."

"Of course. That's what you wanted when you brought me here, wasn't it? That I would bring new ideas, new perspectives to the Continuum?" Jean-Luc's smile turns wry. "As you pointed out earlier, this isn't a new or revolutionary idea at all from _my_ perspective. I grew up in a political entity made up of hundreds of alien worlds and different cultures. It's only a novel idea when it's considered for the Q Continuum."

"How many more such radical ideas lurk in that formerly human mind of yours, I wonder?"

"I suppose, sooner or later, we'll find out. But this one may be the most important. You agree with me that the stakes couldn't be higher – it's not just the stagnation of the Continuum or the arbitrary roadblock we place in the path of the younger Powers that's the problem, it's the fear that someday it may lead to war."

"And if it does come to war, the younger, hungrier, more driven Powers will have the advantage," Q says somberly. "It's why we wanted to study humanity, why we were concerned that someday you might surpass us. Because if those creatures currently playing tag in the Big Red Spot someday take it into their head that they _want_ their very own Continuum, I am not completely sure that we'll know how to stop them."

"And that's why we have to give them ours. Because the Q are right that there can't be two Continuums in the multiverse. But you designed it from the beginning in a way that could accommodate those that aren't Q, if you ever chose."

"I don't think anyone ever thought of it that way, at the time."

"No, but that's why _I'm_ here. Because if anyone's going to have a new idea after billions of years, you'd have most likely had it already. You needed someone new to think of what you couldn't."

"And I love you for it, you know that."

"Yes. I do." For a moment Jean-Luc brushes his energies against the surface of Q's pattern, in the Q equivalent of a kiss. Then he draws back. "But we have work to do at the moment."

"Right." Q tries, very hard, to relax, and fails. He's excited, and thrilled, and scared out of his mind. He couldn't be more nervous if he were a mortal, with nerves. "I'll call the meeting."

"It will be all right, Q." Again Jean-Luc's energies caress his, this time in a longer, slower, deeper movement that's more akin to a hug or a backrub or even holding hands than a kiss. "Neither of us are alone in making this proposal. We have each other, and we have all the allies either of us would traditionally have had. It's not going to be either of us against the _entire_ Continuum."

"No, just most of it."

"Wasn't that the story of your life, before the war?"

Q laughs, because it's true. Ridiculous that a mere ten thousand years of actually having the Continuum _respect_ his ideas and listen to him could have taken his edge off, make him unwilling to offend and frighten people. "True. I suppose I'm doing better now than I was then." He disengages his energies from Jean-Luc's, and grins. "Ready to go shake things up?"

"Now that's the Q I remember from my human days. Lead the way, old friend."

He sends out the message, calling a meeting of the Continuum so that he and Jean-Luc can make the proposal. And he thinks, _Who would have thought, ten thousand years ago, when he was human and telling me to get off his starship, that he'd ever agree to come join me, or that he'd bring even more radical ideas to the Continuum than I ever did? Who'd have thought that __I'd__ embrace the idea of turning the Continuum into something like his Federation, and inviting other Powers to join in?_

_Really, Quinn, you shouldn't have died when you did… I suppose it was necessary, that none of the changes would have happened without it, but you should see what we've become since your sacrifice, what we still have the potential to become in the future._

_Truly, the possibilities are endless._

And then he and Jean-Luc teleport into the meeting place at the heart of the Continuum.

* * *

_**Author's Notes and Dedications:** _

_Does anyone remember the "Five Things" meme? People in many fandoms were writing stories called "Five Things That Never Happened To So-and-so" and then the story would be five separate alternate universes for that character. _

_Well, Q is a character of endless possibilities, so firstly, he wouldn't accept "never happened to". I had to change it to "might have happened to." And secondly, he wouldn't settle for just five. I picked 17 because Q is the seventeenth letter of the alphabet. If I'd been able to do just five I might have gotten this posted in 2005 or thereabouts, but we all know how slow I am. :-) _

_This story is dedicated to Atara Stein and Jeanita Danzik, two Q writers who have both sadly passed away -- Atara in March 2008 and Jeanita in June 2005. This whole story would probably not exist without Atara's "Q-Struck" and its repeated theme, "the possibilities are endless". And one of these pieces owes its current format to Jeanita; I had planned to kill off Picard at the end of one of these stories, and Jeanita threatened to kill me if I did. :-) Well, I did kill Picard off in at least one of these pieces, but not the one I had originally planned; in the new version of the story I discussed with Jeanita, Picard lives. I deeply regret that my friends will never get to see me finish the unfinished projects they helped me with, such as Only Human, and I dedicate this story to their memory. _


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